Fujiko F. Fujio donated Doraemon royalties in Vietnam and died eight months later

The Doraemon Education Support Fund turned 30 years old, and the celebration left a detail that sends chills down your spine: Fujiko F. Fujio died just eight months after signing its creation. His daughter, Katsumata Hinako, told the story on October 28 during the anniversary and the scholarship ceremony for elementary and middle school students in eight provinces of the Red River Delta and the Northern Midlands.

The fund was born from a debt. In late 1992, Vietnamese publisher Kim Dong Publishing House published Doraemon in the country for the first time. Between 1993 and 1995 it released almost the entire series, and Vietnamese children welcomed it with an enthusiasm the publisher itself did not expect.

Kim Dong then wrote to Fujiko F. Fujio and Shogakukan, the exclusive distributor of the work in Japan, with an unusual offer: to pay one billion Vietnamese dong in royalties. The striking part is that Vietnam had not yet joined the international copyright convention. No one was forcing them to pay anything.

Fujiko F. Fujio, the “father of Doraemon,” gave both his money and his last smiles to Vietnamese children.vietnam.vn

In 1996, the author accepted Kim Dong's invitation and traveled to Vietnam with Shogakukan representatives. There they agreed to donate that one billion dong to create the Doraemon Education Support Fund, with additional contributions from the Vietnamese publisher. During that visit, Deputy Prime Minister Nguyen Khanh received the author and the Ministry of Culture and Information awarded him the medal “For the cause of Vietnamese culture.”

A trip with his health already broken

Katsumata Hinako accompanied her father on that trip and remembered it without embellishment: he was ill, his health was not good, and he had already cut back his activity as a manga artist quite a bit. Even so, he decided to go. After signing the agreement, the two visited a children's center.

The scene his daughter describes is that of a man surrounded by children, listening to them and responding with a smile. “The image of my father listening to the children's conversation and responding with a smile made me see him as a completely different person from the father I usually see at home,” she said. And she added: “My father's sweet smile remains etched in my heart, even after 30 years.”

Katsumata Hinako, Fujiko F. Fujio's second daughter, recounts her father's trip to Vietnam 30 years ago to establish the Doraemon Foundation.vietnam.vn

The author died eight months later. That is why his daughter insists that the Doraemon Foundation was one of the last major projects he was directly involved in. She does not say it as an archival fact: she says it as someone who still has that smile stuck in her chest.

The fund's numbers

The fund was not sustained by the author's donation alone. Nguyen Thang Vu, former director of Kim Dong, was a co-founder and in 2010 added another one billion dong as initial capital. Today the Doraemon Smart Robot Cat Scholarship Fund, as it is now called, has a capital of 5 billion dong.

In 30 years it has awarded 14,794 scholarships, worth a total of nearly 11.5 billion dong. The anniversary celebration was also one more scholarship ceremony for students in the northern region of Vietnam.

It is not common for an author of Fujiko F. Fujio's stature to close his life with a gesture like that, and less so in a country where manga was just starting to arrive. Did you know this part of the life of the creator of Doraemon? Tell us in the comments.