Meet ‘Japanese Bart Simpson’, Manga bad boy Crayon Shin-chan
Rude, nude and crude 5-year-old star of an animated TV show shuns almost every cultural tradition Japan holds dear, except the importance of family
He gives his parents lip, bares his bottom and makes a lot of jokes about breaking wind. All in all, Shinnosuke Nohara is not the son that the average Japanese parent would be proud of. Another enduring trait is that the rabble-rousing 5-year-old – better known as Crayon Shin-chan – simply refuses to grow up.
This spring marks the 25th anniversary of this two-dimensional terror making his first appearance in an animated television programme on TV Asahi, two years after he had stormed into the Japanese consciousness in the pages of Weekly Manga Action.
Japan is no stranger to enduring animated television series – Sazae-san started as a comic strip in a local newspaper in April 1946, has seen more than 7,600 print and TV episodes and is in the Guinness Book of World Records for the longest-running animated TV show – but Crayon Shin-chan is a very different creature.
“Crayon Shin-chan is the irreverent child of Sazae-san and when he made his television debut in 1992, it took people by surprise,” said Roland Kelts, author of Japanamerica: How Japanese pop culture has invaded the US.
“This is the utter lampooning of all the Japanese respectability that was so carefully created after the war in the same way that The Simpsons was the lampooning of the American dream,” he told This Week in Asia.