The Ancient Power Of Dogu
By: Charz
Tags: Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo, Dogu, Dogu Revival, Dogu statues, Doraemon, Jomon, Shinji Nishikawa, Yasunari Kawabata, Yoshio Sawai
Category: Funny, Japan, Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo
Finishing Move “Docking” ~Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo E02
Dogu Statues
The dogu are humanoid forms shaped in clay, large and small, richly decorated or homely and unadorned. Some 18,000 of them have been unearthed to date, in Jomon-period settlements stretching from Kyushu, north through Tohoku to Hokkaido. The oldest are nearly 10,000 years old, the youngest a mere 2,300.
Dogu Revival
Another Jomon enthusiast was Nobel prize-winning author Yasunari Kawabata, who had a dogu on his desk. It is a lugubrious figure with a heart-shaped face, and Kawabata described in an essay how “it is sitting here in front of my writing paper and speaking to me.”
Dogu still speak — albeit through rather different media today. They feature in the “Understanding Japanese History” comic-book series narrated by cult robocat Doraemon, whose human sidekick Nobita remarks that they “look like aliens.” In the PlayStation game “Dokioki,” the dogu are indeed aliens. Shinji Nishikawa‘s “Dogu Famir,” a seven-volume comic series, features a family of figurines trying to fit into everyday life — shopping, attending school and protecting the usual assortment of scantily-clad manga heroines from an evil, UFO-controlled dogu
The dogu have something to tell us, Japan Times, Oct. 2, 2009
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