Obituary: Hiroshi Fujimoto

Few English tourists in Paris would think of visiting the Librairie Tonkam (29 rue Keller) or Samourai (42 rue de Mauberge, just a few steps from the Gare du Nord). Yet these are two of the most fascinating bookshops in the capital, for they are full of Japanese manga, which the cartoonist Kenshi Hirokane recently defined at the Festival d'Annecy devoted to cartoon comics as "graphic novels".

The craze for manga comics and their animated movie versions has reached epidemic proportions in Japan, South-East Asia and Europe. Even my small TV Andorra station regularly screens Japanese comic-book serials like Dragon Ball, Akira and Goldorak. Dragon Ball Z, the movie version, broke box-office records in France, at the same time sparking off parental protests about its violence and sexual content. When Hayao Miyazaki's brilliantly funny and technically innovative Porco Rosso hit the movie screens in Paris in 1995, it even outclassed Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct for several weeks of its run, and it is still being regularly re-issued.

Hiroshi Fujimoto was one of the moving spirits in the great surge of enthusiasm in Japan for manga magazines, books and movies. He worked in tandem with a close friend from schooldays, Abiko Motoo, born like Hiroshi in Toyama Prefecture. His date of birth made him only three months Hiroshi's junior. They used the pen-name of Fujio-Fujiko and lived together in the same small apartment in downtown Tokyo until their success as cartoonist storytellers allowed them to marry and buy palatial adjoining residences for their families.

Fujio-Fujiko first achieved fame with the children's comic tale Obake no Kyutaro, popularly called "Oba-Q". After it appeared in February 1964 in Shonen Sande ("Shonen Sunday") magazine, its success was so meteoric, the publisher changed his magazine from a monthly to a weekly, starring the strange amorphous figure of Oba-Q which soon began to turn up everywhere as toys and on posters and children's clothes.

This success was followed by Ninja Hattorikun, which, as the title suggests, was a spoof ninja drama, Paman, an amiable idiot and above all the greatest children's icon ever since the Seventies, Doraemon.

It is hard to explain to Westerners the perverse fascination of this atomic-powered robotic cat. It far surpasses in originality our own insufferable cat Garfield.

The bicephalic authors first unleashed Doraemon in the pages of Shogakkan, a comic weekly of the standard 300-page format, in 1970. In a typical childhood fantasy, the little boy Nobita, a bookish, bespectacled nerd, discovers this cute, cool, magical cat in the drawer of the desk at which all Japanese children slave over their homework. Doraemon is smart, with three spiky whiskers on either side of a capacious mouth, and a sort of kangaroo pouch from which he produces all kinds of astonishing things, including a miniature helicopter that enables him to zoom around the room and the countryside.

He is surely a small child's dream-fulfilment fantasy of an all-powerful protector in a harsh adult world of endless swotting and school bullying. Like many Japanese robot figures, Doraemon is at the opposite pole to frightening cyborg creatures with surrealist armour and deadly weapons like atomic ray guns. He is reassuring, despite his odd behaviour, and much easier for a child to identify with than with a cold, calculating machine hero. Sales of Doraemon books and merchandising reached phenomenal heights when the first annual animated version appeared in 1979.

One of the most popular forms of manga, enjoyed by both children and adults, is the "how-to-succeed-in-business" story, which covers nearly every profession in Japan - sushi- maker, chess player, sportsman (particularly golfer and footballer and basketballer), photographer and - of course - manga cartoon artist. Fujio- Fujiko cartooned the story of their own lives together in Manga Michi ("The Way of the Manga"), which became a highly successful television serial drama on NHK.

The adventures of Nobita and Doraemon now comprise 50 stout volumes, with sales of over 50 million copies. Their combined personal income for the fiscal year 1980 was $1.7m, and it has kept rising ever since. Fujiko without Fujio is unthinkable. Death is some-thing even Doraemon cannot overcome.

Hiroshi Fujimoto, cartoonist: born Toyama, Japan 12 December 1933; married (three daughters); died Tokyo 23 September 1996.