This is an image of a Doraemon pajama suit made in China, which is commonly found in Chinatowns throughout the U.S. Doraemon is the robot cat sent back in time by Sewashi (Nobita’s great-great grandson) to aid Nobita, the protagonist of the very popular manga series created in Japan in the 1970s called “Doraemon”. It expanded throughout many countries in Asia in the 1980s and 1990s. The popularity of Doraemon was so widespread that the character Doraemon could be found in many daily products such as lunchbox, pajamas, notebooks, backpacks, etc. Although Doraemon was widespread throughout Asia which symbolized the expansion of Japanese popular culture, it was not culturally influential in that the popularity of this character or manga series did not result in widespread consciousness that Doraemon is characteristically Japanese. Due to its popularity throughout Asia, Doraemon took on more of an Asian identity than a specifically Japanese identity. Thus, Doraemon was culturally odorless. Cultural odor, as defined by Koichi Iwabuchi in Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism, is “focus on the way in which cultural features of a country of origin and images or ideas of its national, in most cases stereotyped, way of life are associated positively with a particular product in the consumption process” (27). Products that have cultural odor mean that it would allow consumers of a product to associate the product with an aspect of the culture that the product originated from. In the case of Doraemon, besides the story taking place in Japan, viewers rarely associated Doraemon with a particular aspect of Japanese culture. Often times, some people forgot that Doraemon originated in Japan because Doraemon was massively produced throughout many Asian countries.

Iwachi, Koichi. Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002.