どーもくん, Where Art Thou?

In Japan it seems that almost everybody has to have a cute mascot. Baseball teams, corporations, even the Jietai (Japanese Self-Defense Forces); all have warm and fuzzy creations to put a big, friendly, non-threatening face on a lot of day-to-day stuff (canned coffee, smokestacks, self-propelled artillery etc.).

So, it was with some surprise when Japan's national media network, NHK (日本放送協会 Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai ), introduced Domo-kun sometime in the late '90s. He was not cute - at least not in the conventional sense. The poor guy was a large, boxy, woolly brown creature with a perpetually open mouth full of large, menacing teeth. His only real connection with NHK seemed to be that he loved watching T.V. (he got his name by mimicking the polite " domo konnichiwa " that the NHK announcers use when greeting viewers). Some people have pointed out that Domo-kun kind of looks like a television set, too (albeit, a large, woolly brown one with large menacing teeth...). A few years ago I had the good fortune to meet one of the prop designers who helped develop the whole Domo-kun idea. She said that it just kind of came about in a stream-of-consciousness thing, and that they initially weren't sure if the big guy would connect with viewers ("He just seemed so weird!"). Yet, they found something endearing about him, so they went for it. That sums up my fascination with him, too: Domo-kun, in his own sweet, mono-syllabic way, wormed himself into my gruff heart. I found myself looking forward to the brief fifteen-second slots that they made for him between news shows and documentaries. He even became something of a cult figure here in the west, but recently I haven't seen hide nor hair from him. Anybody out there know where he's at? If you are a Domo-kun fan give us a yell.