Why Doraemon Never Let Nobita Get Rich

When I was a kid, I couldn’t understand why Doraemon didn’t just fix Nobita’s life. Anywhere Door. Time Machine. If Phone Booth. Dictator Button. Shrink Ray. Bamboo Copter. Life Reset Machine. Devil’s Passport. Time-Stop Watch. Any one of them could turn a loser into a billionaire overnight.

Nobita stays Nobita. Zero on tests. Beaten up by Gian. Laughed at by Suneo. Yelled at by his mom. His allowance is tiny. His room is a mess. His life is a punchline.

That’s not because Fujiko F. Fujio forgot. He made a choice.

The Get-Rich Schemes That Always Failed

In one episode, Nobita’s dad runs into an old teacher. The teacher once taught his dad to paint. Back then, nobody bought his paintings. Now one is worth six million yen. Nobita’s eyes light up. He wants to use the Time Machine to go back and buy the teacher’s paintings before he became famous.

What happens? He buys the painting. It’s a study his dad painted when he was young.

Nobita holds the painting, standing in the room, blank-faced. He didn’t lose money. He didn’t make any either. He tried to cut off history with the Time Machine. History played a joke on him. You think you’ve predicted the future. You’ve found another way to miss.

Another episode. Doraemon finds a diary from a hundred years in the future. The diary’s owner is going to bury treasure tomorrow. Nobita gets so excited he drags Doraemon off to hunt for it. They find the person in the middle of the night. It’s Nobita’s uncle. So they wait. They watch. They see him dig a hole, bury something, and leave.

Then they rush over and dig it up.

What they find is not treasure. It’s junk his uncle buried when he was a kid.

Nobita squats by the hole, a rusty piece of metal in his hand. He thought he was digging up the future. He was digging up someone else’s childhood. You think you’re taking a shortcut. At the end of the shortcut is another long road.

The cruelest episode is the noise absorber.

The neighbor’s stereo is too loud. Doraemon takes out a noise absorber and sucks all the noise in. Nobita immediately starts scheming. He goes to his dad and says: I’ll get rid of the noise for you. Pay me.

Dad won’t pay.

Nobita releases the noise. Dad can’t stand it and agrees. Nobita raises the price, from 130 to 180. Just before the deal is done, the neighbor stops. Nobita panics. He runs to the neighbor and asks him to turn the stereo back on. The neighbor gets complained about by someone else and stops again. Nobita actually calls a construction crew to start work outside his own house.

Dad finally pays 300.

Nobita clutches the money, happily reading comics. Then Mom walks in. She thinks he stole it. She confiscates it.

Nobita opens his mouth. Not a word comes out.

Fujiko F. Fujio doesn’t even give him a chance to let the money get warm. You can get away with it for a moment. You can’t get away with it forever. You turn your dad’s suffering into a business opportunity, family love into blackmail, public peace into a paid service. In the end, the person who takes your money isn’t your dad. It’s your mom. You got past every moral checkpoint. You can’t get past life itself.

Another episode. Doraemon and Nobita build a virtual nature inside their room. Mountains, water, trees, wind. Nobita immediately turns it into a paid field-trip zone. Ten yen per person.

Ten yen. Not much. Nobita actually gets paid.

And then? The visitors come. They litter. They trample the grass. They pick flowers. They make noise. When everyone leaves, the room is a disaster. Nobita stands in the garbage, getting scolded by his mom.

Once something beautiful is completely commercialized, what’s left is often not profit. It’s garbage.

The Gadgets He Was Allowed to Use

All these stories say the same thing. Fujiko F. Fujio never steps out to say it. He doesn’t write narration. He doesn’t write summaries. He doesn’t have Doraemon stand on a high place and lecture Nobita. He lets things happen. Lets Nobita make mistakes. Lets the mistakes ferment. Lets the consequences find their way to the door.

Nobita wants to get rich overnight? Let him fail. Nobita wants to speculate? Let him come up empty. Nobita wants to blackmail? Let the blackmail money be confiscated. Nobita wants to turn beauty into a business? Let beauty turn into garbage.

This isn’t punishment. It’s demonstration. A cheat code can’t be a person for you. A gadget can’t grow up for you.

But Fujiko F. Fujio is not a rigid moralist.

Nobita uses the Time Machine to see his grandmother. She sits on the porch, sunlight falling on her. Nobita looks at her, tears falling. Grandma says, Nobita, you’ve gotten taller. Nobita says, Grandma, I missed you so much. Grandma says, Be well.

In this scene, Fujiko F. Fujio doesn’t make Nobita fail. He makes Nobita cry. He makes the reader cry too.

Nobita uses gadgets to help his friends. He often messes up, but his intentions are kind. Nobita plays pranks. Crams for tests. Occasionally satisfies a little vanity. These are allowed.

Why? Because they don’t exploit others. They don’t break fairness. They don’t treat other people as tools. They satisfy emotion, curiosity, kindness, companionship.

In these moments, the gadgets are not life modifiers. They are emotion amplifiers. They let Nobita briefly touch the person he wishes he could be. And they let the reader feel the warmth technology should have.

The moment Nobita tries to use gadgets to get rich, monopolize, dominate, or take revenge, Fujiko F. Fujio steps in at once. Greed is not growth. Robbing fate is not changing it.

What Doraemon Was Teaching

If Doraemon really let Nobita use gadgets to become the richest man in the world, what would happen to the story?

It would become a power fantasy.

Nobita wouldn’t need to work hard anymore. He wouldn’t need courage. He wouldn’t need to face failure. He would just need to cry. Doraemon would pull out a gadget. And solve everything.

That kind of story is satisfying, of course. But it would destroy the most precious thing about Doraemon. Truth.

The reason Nobita makes us empathize isn’t that he has Doraemon. It’s that he’s like us. He’s weak. Lazy. A dreamer. A quitter. But he’s also kind. Sincere. Compassionate. He fails again and again. And he stands up again and again.

His growth doesn’t come from a gadget directly cashing out into wealth. It comes from messing up, reflecting, losing, recovering, and slowly gaining courage, friendship, empathy, and a sense of responsibility.

A cheat code can give you convenience. But it can’t take a step for you. A gadget can solve a temporary problem. But it can’t solve the weaknesses of human nature. Nobita’s problem is inferiority, dependence, avoidance. Not test scores or a poor family.

And Doraemon can’t give him those. Only Nobita can give them to himself.

Doraemon has another very ahead-of-its-time idea. Doraemon comes from the 22nd century. But the gadgets often break. Have side effects. Get misused. The future hasn’t become heaven because of technology. People are still greedy. Vain. Lazy. Quarrelsome.

This shows Fujiko F. Fujio had a clear-eyed optimism about technology. Technology can benefit humanity. But the more powerful technology is, the more important the user’s character becomes.

The If Phone Booth can create an ideal world. But the ideal world often becomes a nightmare. The Dictator Button can make people you hate disappear. But in the end, what disappears is your own conscience. The Devil’s Passport lets you do whatever you want. But at the end of doing whatever you want is fear and loneliness.

These gadgets all ask the same question. If you had unlimited power, what kind of person would you become?

Nobita’s answer is usually: someone who gets scared, regrets, and ultimately chooses to be kind.

That’s what Fujiko F. Fujio wanted to pass on to children. Technology is not the answer. People are the answer.

Some people say Nobita’s life doesn’t change dramatically because of Doraemon.

That’s not true.

In the original future, Nobita might marry Gian’s sister. His life is mediocre. Maybe even miserable. But later, he has a different future. That change doesn’t come from a gadget buying it for him.

What does it come from?

From Nobita’s kindness. From his courage at the decisive moment. From his respect and protection of Shizuka. From his noisy but real friendship with Gian and Suneo. From Doraemon’s long companionship, trust, and guidance.

Doraemon isn’t there to make Nobita a rich man or a strong man. He’s there to let a self-doubting, lonely, weak child know: someone loves him. Someone believes in him. Someone is with him.

Change comes through character. Relationships. Attitude.

In “Goodbye, Doraemon,” the most moving part isn’t Nobita using a gadget to beat Gian.

It’s that he doesn’t want Doraemon to worry, so even though he knows he can’t win, he keeps fighting.

He gets hit. Thrown. Stepped on. He gets up. Gets hit again. Thrown again. Stepped on again. He gets up again.

He doesn’t win. But he doesn’t run.

In that moment, Nobita stands up in spirit. He doesn’t become the richest man in the world. But he becomes someone worth loving.

That’s closer to happiness than getting rich.

When Fujiko F. Fujio drew Doraemon, Japan was in the middle of rapid economic growth. Materialism swept society. People believed money could solve everything. Believed success meant having more.

Fujiko F. Fujio didn’t simply criticize money. He didn’t preach poverty either. He just kept telling children: happiness is not the same as getting rich overnight. Success is not the same as domination. Changing your fate is not the same as taking shortcuts.

He lets Nobita fail. Not to make readers despair. To make readers clear-eyed. He lets gadgets go out of control. Not to shatter fantasy. To give fantasy a boundary. He lets Nobita return to everyday life. Not because he doesn’t want Nobita to win. Because the only win worth chasing is the one over the person you were yesterday.

So the most powerful gadget in Doraemon’s pocket was never the Anywhere Door, the Time Machine, or the If Phone Booth.

It’s that it lets a child believe: even if you’re weak now, you don’t have to be bad. Even if you don’t get rich, you’re still worth loving. Even if you fail again and again, you can still stand up.

Once a person believes that, their life has already begun to change.

Nobita doesn’t become the richest man in the world. But he becomes a better person.

That’s harder than any gadget. And more precious than any gadget.

And Fujiko F. Fujio, through an entire series of comics, said only this one thing.