Fake ‘Doraemon’ – fan fiction busted

Artist pays up for phony ‘Doraemon’
asahi.com : 05/31/2007
Tajima T. Yasue, the man who created an unauthorized last installment of “Doraemon,” the popular manga that features a blue cat robot and its friend, Nobita, has admitted to his misdeed and paid a fee to the publisher and the original author’s production company.
In the final story, Nobita, the boy protagonist, grows up to become a top robot engineer 35 years later and revives “Doraemon,” who has become frozen in place because his batteries have run down…more...

This problem is rather ironic. The original team who wrote the real Doraemon, “Fujiko Fujio” started out publishing their own manga fan fiction magazines of popular comics by Osamu Tezuka. They even made a lot of money doing this fan fiction while they were still in high school. Japan’s most popular manga, Doraemon, owes most of its financial and spiritual start to fan fiction.

Of course, Tajima T. Yasue took his “Fake Coterie” a whole different level—copyright violation, as you can see by the professional-looking publications shown above and on the left. Looks like his doujinshi got a little too popular (rewarding). The interesting thing is that the Doraemon copyright holders only took “some” of Yasue’s earnings from the fake. Actually, Yasue’s story sounds very interesting: Check it out in this English translation.

And if you want to read the real Doraemon stories in English, check out one of the many Doraemon books such this live animal in Doraemon’s pants, hee, hee.

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Available at Amazon.com: Doraemon Bilingual Picture Book 1: The Live Animal Book (Japanese Edition)