Character · Doraemon
Doraemon
A robot cat with no ears, a fear of mice, and a pocket that holds the entire twenty-second century.
In Otakana the clue reads: Blue robot cat with a fourth-dimensional pocket
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Doraemon
- Letters
- 8 · Easy
Sewashi Nobi has a problem. His family is poor because his great-great-grandfather Nobita made a mess of everything, so he sends a second-hand household robot back to 1969 to fix the boy before the damage compounds. The robot is Doraemon. He lives in Nobita's closet, eats dorayaki by the plateful, and reaches into a four-dimensional pouch on his stomach whenever the boy comes home crying.
The gadgets are the engine of the whole series. The Anywhere Door opens onto any place you name. The Take-copter is a propeller that clips to your head. The Time Kerchief ages or restores whatever it covers. Nobita always misuses them, the misuse always inflates into disaster, and Doraemon usually has to confiscate the thing by dinner. Fujiko F. Fujio kept that shape for over a thousand short stories and rarely let a gadget solve anything cleanly.
Doraemon was yellow once, with ears, until a robot mouse chewed them off and the shock drained his colour. That is why a cat the size of a filing cabinet panics at the sight of a mouse. Serialisation began in Shogakukan's children's magazines in December 1969, Shin-Ei Animation's television version started in 1979 and has never really stopped, and in 2008 the Japanese foreign ministry made him an official anime ambassador.
Spelling DORAEMON
DORAEMON is eight letters and the middle of it is the trap. A and E sit side by side, do-ra-e-mon, four beats with nothing joining the vowels. Guessers who type it from memory tend to drop the E and land on DORAMON, which is one tile short. Two O's, first and seventh, and the name is written half in katakana and half in hiragana in Japanese.