As Hong Kongers rally for the right to choose their own chief executive over Beijing’s pick, tens of thousands of mainland Chinese are participating in a one person, one vote online opinion poll that asks whether China should boycott a blue Japanese cat.
Nothing seems more harmless than the plump-faced Japanese cartoon robot cat, Doraemon, who does not even have claws. He is the key character of a manga series of
the same name first published in 1969, which was subsequently adapted into a long-running anime series. But Chinese newspapers cautioned their countrymen: Beware of this “blue fatty” — the Japanese
are exporting their values through him.
Last Friday, three major newspapers in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province, fired a salvo of accusations against Doraemon for its “political overtones” and being a tool of Japan’s “cultural invasion.” The articles bashing the cat, who has amassed an enormous number of Chinese fans since the introduction of the series into the country in 1991, have triggered a cascade of rebuttal commentaries and started heated debates online, in response to which the Chinese news portal Tencent started the poll on Sunday.
More than 70,000 people had voted as of Monday morning, 77 percent of whom said no to the proposed boycott. An editorial headlined, “On what basis should the Chinese audience boycott Doraemon?” accompanying the poll has drawn more than 9,000 comments.
The three articles came after 100 Doraemon Secret Gadgets Expo, an exhibition featuring 100 Doraemon figures, made a splash in downtown Chengdu in August.
The Chengdu Economic Daily asserted that the fact the Japanese Foreign Ministry, rather than the country’s cultural or economic authorities, had named the cat an “anime ambassador” showed that Japan’s motive in doing so was political, rather than cultural. The newspaper said it was an “indisputable fact” that Doraemon was being used by Japan to “export the country’s values and realize its cultural invasion.”
Japan’s former foreign minister, Masahiko Komura, appointed the cat an “anime ambassador” in 2008 in the hope that the character would deepen the world’s understanding of the country.
The Chengdu Evening News and The Chengdu Daily both urged their readers not to forget the war crimes that Japan committed in China during the second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945), in which Chinese casualties were estimated to be as high as 35 million, according to Chinese government figures.
The Chengdu Daily faulted Japan for its hypocrisy. It said that while Japan had chosen Doraemon to be the country’s ambassador in Tokyo’s bid for the 2020 Olympics, representing the Japanese core values of “respect and friendship,” the Japanese government had been “repeatedly grappling with papering over and whitewashing its history of invasion.”
“How can a country that has self-contradictory values and has betrayed history and society win recognition from others?” the article said, while also warning Chinese to stay calm-minded while “kissing the cheeks of the ‘blue fatty.’ ”
In July, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan announced a reinterpretation of the country’s pacifist Constitution to allow its military to aid friendly nations under attack. The move has added fuel to the mounting tensions between Japan and China as the two both claim sovereignty over an island chain known as the Diaoyu in China and the Senkaku in Japan, as well as vast swaths of strategically important sea. China has also vehemently condemned Japanese officials’ repeated visits to a Tokyo war shrine that honors convicted war criminals from World War II.
Users on China’s Twitter-like Weibo have piled up tens of thousands of comments under posts of the three articles.
“What’s wrong with Doraemon? Why do we have to politicize everything?” one Weibo user commented.
“I have betrayed the Party — I liked the blue fatty,” another mocked.
Some Weibo users agreed with the newspaper articles: “I have asked to my kid to stop watching Doraemon. It only teaches kids how to play pranks on others and reap without sowing,” a user commented, referring to the plots in which Doraemon’s best friend, Nobita Nobi, a schoolboy, always turns to the cat’s magical pocket to get out of trouble or hit back at bullies.
Commentaries defending Doraemon also emerged over the weekend. An opinion piece published in The Beijing News called the association of Doraemon with politics and cultural invasion “incorrigible delusions of persecution,” while the Tencent editorial defended the preference of Chinese for Japanese anime over domestic comics, pointing out that the low quality of the latter has long “shocked” fans.
The Japanese Embassy in Beijing declined to comment on the matter.