I am continually amazed that my three-year old daughter is enjoying some of the same cartoon characters that I grew up with, even though we came to know them in different cultural settings and in different countries. One particularly interesting character is Cheburashka, “an animal unknown to science,” who accidentally finds himself in Moscow and befriends a Crocodile, who works at the zoo as a crocodile. The animated movies about Cheburashka were originally made in Soviet Union in the 1960’s and 70’s and, after much copyright controversy, are currently produced by both South Korean and Japanese companies. Cheburashka is quite popular in Japan, as my wife and I were shocked to discover back in 2007 by walking into a huge Cheburashka-themed store in Roppongi Hills in Tokyo. To me, Cheburashka’s comeback to popularity through foreign culture seems rather symbolic.
I think one of the secrets of this character’s popularity and longevity is that the central theme of the stories about him is friendship. In Japan, the term moai refers to a small group of close friends outside of one’s work and family. Dan Buettner, in his book about world’s healthiest and happiest people called “The Blue Zones Solution,” identifies moai as one of the contributing elements to longevity of people from Okinawa, one of the “blue zones” reported in the study. In some cultures (certainly in all “blue zones”), moais form naturally, but in North America in general, “one needs to work at it,” according to Buettner. Making friends is not always easy, and creating a life-long moai that is sufficiently small to be intimate and, therefore, effective (about five people) is fundamentally different from being superficially (often, virtually) active in a large social network.
It is fascinating that in 1960’s, in the Soviet Union, fictional Cheburashka and his friends were bringing small groups of friends together, which is not unlike “blue zone” social projects that occupy progressive minds of the present day US of A.
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