Part 18: The Works That Never Crossed: Doraemon, Sazae-san, and the Negative Space

Seventeen essays about what happens to manga when it crosses into English. This one is about the manga that did not.

Not the obscure ones — that would be a boring essay about obscurity. I mean the biggest. The ones that in Japan are not hits but furniture: works so embedded that they are less like popular series than like the weather. Three of them, and between them they are probably the most-read, most-watched, longest-running body of work the medium has produced.

In English, they are close to invisible.

Three Giants You Have Not Read

Doraemon. A robot cat comes back from the twenty-second century to help a hopeless boy named Nobita, using gadgets from a pocket on his stomach, and the gadgets always make things worse because Nobita is a child. Fujiko F. Fujio ran it from 1969. It is, by most reasonable measures, the most famous character in Asia — Japan's Foreign Ministry literally made him an anime ambassador in 2008. Children across an entire hemisphere can draw him from memory.

In America, essentially nothing. Disney XD ran a localized version in 2014 — forks instead of chopsticks, dollars instead of yen, the boys renamed Noby and Sneech and Big G — and it went nowhere at all.

Sazae-san. Machiko Hasegawa started it as a newspaper four-panel in 1946, and the anime has run continuously since 1969, which makes it the longest-running animated television series in the history of the planet, by a margin measured in decades. It is a family. They have small problems. The problems resolve. Nothing happens, on purpose, every Sunday evening, for fifty-odd years. It is so tied to Sunday evening that Japan has a name for the specific dread of the weekend ending — Sazae-san syndrome — which is a level of cultural penetration no Western show has ever approached. You have not seen it. Almost no one outside Japan has.

Kochikame. Osamu Akimoto ran it in Weekly Shonen Jump from 1976 to 2016 — forty years, roughly two hundred volumes, without missing a weekly deadline. Sit with that. This site's Serialization Machine essays spent seventy parts on what a weekly schedule does to a human being, and this man did it for four decades and stopped voluntarily. It is the longest-running series in the history of the magazine that this entire medium's economics revolve around. It is, in English, essentially unavailable.

Three works. Not failures. Not cult objects. The load-bearing walls of the medium, and the English-speaking world has effectively never met them.

The Bad Explanations

The reflex answers are all wrong, and clearing them out is most of the work.

They are for children. So was Astro Boy, and Part 1 was about how it crossed in 1963 and started everything. So is Pokémon.

They are too old. Akira is from 1982 and crossed like a bomb. Part 13 was about it.

The art looks dated. Partly true and nowhere near sufficient — plenty of visually antique work has crossed, and Sazae-san's flat, plain style is not more foreign to a Western eye than early Tezuka.

Nobody licensed them. This is the circular one. Why did nobody license the most famous character in Asia?

The real answer is structural, and it is the mirror image of Part 10.

The Hole They Do Not Fit Through

Part 10 argued that Cowboy Bebop crossed almost intact because it was already a translation — a Japanese show built out of American parts, so that dubbing it into English carried it home. And it ended on an uncomfortable corollary I promised to state rather than dodge: the works that survive the crossing best are not the best works. They are the most rootless ones.

This essay is that corollary's other half, and it is worse.

For a work to cross, it has to pass a test with two contradictory clauses. It must be exotic enough to be interesting — there must be some reason to import it rather than make a local one, some texture, some strangeness, something you cannot get at home. And it must be universal enough to be legible — the thing it is about has to survive arriving in a country that shares none of its assumptions.

Almost everything this series has discussed threads that needle. Ninja and pirates and giant robots and titans are exotic; growing up, wanting to be strong, and losing your friends are universal. The exoticism is the ticket and the universality is the seat.

Now apply it to Doraemon. Is it exotic? No. It is a boy who has not done his homework, who is being bullied, who wants a nap. That is not strange anywhere on earth; it is the most ordinary material imaginable, which is the entire point of it and the source of its power. Is it universal? Also no — and this is the trap. Because the specific texture of Nobita's ordinariness is Japanese to the bone: the shape of the school day, the entrance-exam dread sitting under everything, the tatami room, the mother's exact register of exasperation, the neighbourhood, the seasons, the shame. The ordinariness is the Japanese content. There is nothing else in it.

So it fails both clauses at once, and it fails them for the same reason. Too ordinary to be exotic; too Japanese to be ordinary. There is no angle of approach. You cannot sell it as strange, because it is about homework. You cannot sell it as familiar, because its whole substance is the fine grain of a particular country's daily life. The Disney localization understood the problem exactly and reached for the only lever available — swap the chopsticks for forks, the yen for dollars, sand off the Japan — which removes the only thing in the work. What is left is a boy and a cat and a gadget, and America has ten thousand of those.

Sazae-san fails harder still, because it has no plot to sell. Kochikame fails on pure logistics on top of everything else: two hundred volumes is not a licensing decision, it is a civil engineering project, and it is forty years of topical Japanese jokes about a Tokyo neighbourhood — Part 15's problem, at industrial scale.

These works are not too weak to cross. They are too rooted to cross. And rootedness is not a defect; in Japan it is exactly why they are loved. It is why they are furniture. A nation's most beloved works are frequently the ones most completely made of that nation, which is precisely the property that will not survive a border.

Which produces the ugly law this series has been walking toward for eighteen parts. The manga that crosses is not the best manga. It is the manga that is least about Japan. Everything an English-speaking reader knows about this medium has been filtered through a sieve whose mesh is "will this be legible to someone who is not Japanese" — and the most Japanese things, which are frequently the best-loved things, do not go through. Our entire picture of the medium is the residue. We think we are looking at manga. We are looking at what fits.

The Numbers Produce Their Fifth Miracle

Doraemon reduces to Destiny 4, Heart's Desire 9, Personality 22.

Fujiko F. Fujio reduces to Destiny 4, Heart's Desire 9, Personality 22.

Identical. All three. The cat and the man who made him, on every axis, including a master number — the fifth clean match this series has produced, after Nausicaä in Part 3, Yamadera in Part 10, atashi and Akira in Part 13, and watashi in Part 14.

Five. In several hundred pairs. Which is, as I said in Part 10 before three of these had turned up, roughly what chance predicts — and I want to point at that, because it is the most useful thing in this essay. A numerologist meeting "the creator and his creation share all three numbers" would stop working. It is a perfect result. It is the kind of thing you would put on the cover.

And it is exactly, boringly, the rate at which coincidences occur. The correct response to a miracle is to count how many chances it had.

Then, because the letters are not finished being funny: Nobita comes out Destiny 7, Heart's Desire 7, Personality 9 — which is, precisely, Kaze no Tani no Nausicaa and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind from Part 3. The arithmetic cannot distinguish between Miyazaki's warrior-scientist princess and a ten-year-old who cannot find his homework. Same three numbers. Same profile. Same paragraph of vibration about the Seeker's search for hidden truth.

One of them is a girl kneeling in a poisoned garden testing whether the world can be saved. The other is Nobita. The lens reports no difference whatsoever.

And a last one, which is genuinely instructive: Kochikame is a Destiny 4. Its full title — Kochira Katsushika Ku Kameari Koen Mae Hashutsujo, forty-eight characters, "This is the Police Station in Front of Kameari Park in Katsushika Ward" — is also a Destiny 4. The abbreviation and the monster it abbreviates land on the same number.

Which is chance, and which is also the only time in this series the arithmetic has accidentally been right about something: the nickname really is the title, functionally. Japan calls it Kochikame. Nobody says the long one. The 4 held across the contraction the way Zoro's 4 held across the lawyer's letter in Part 2, and for the same reason — nobody was aiming at the part the number was reading.

The Close

Doraemon's Personality is a 22, the Master Builder: grand vision made concrete and built to last. It means nothing. But it is the face the name shows the world, and the thing has run since 1969 and will outlive everyone reading this, so the accident has at least landed on a true fact.

Here is what I keep returning to. There is a robot cat that a billion people love. There is a family that has been having small resolvable problems on Sunday evening since before the moon landing, and a policeman who showed up every week for forty years without once missing. None of it crossed. Not because anyone butchered it — nobody flipped it, or renamed it, or cut twenty minutes out of it, or handed it to a dub director with a mean streak. The machinery of destruction this series has spent seventeen essays cataloguing never even got a chance to touch them.

They simply did not come. They were too much themselves.

And that is the negative space that everything else in this series has been drawn around. Part 1 asked what a translation actually is and answered: a rebuild. Seventeen parts later the harder answer is that the crossing happens long before anyone translates a word — at the moment somebody decides which works will be offered at all. Every loss I have catalogued is a loss inside the frame. This is the frame.

Somewhere in Japan, right now, it is Sunday evening. The theme song is playing. Several million people feel their weekend ending in their stomach, and a family on the screen has a small problem, and by the end of the half hour it will be fine. It has been fine every week since 1969.

Nothing was translated. Nothing was lost. It just never left, and we never knew to miss it.