What Shin Chan Knew

I don’t really have role models, but if anyone gets to claim that title with me, it’s a small, crude Japanese kid with a big mouth who understood something essential about how to handle teachers, parents, and basically everyone else: Shin Chan.

This week I read that Yoshito Usui, the guy who created Shin Chan, was found dead in the mountains near Tokyo. He’d been missing for days. They identified him by his teeth. The news hit different than I expected—not because I was close to him, but because Shin Chan was one of those things that felt eternal, the kind of stupid perfect thing that didn’t need a creator, that just existed.

Watching the show when it aired on RTL II was like having permission to be crude and selfish and clever all at once. Shin Chan didn’t apologize for who he was. He had moves—the Po-Boogie-Woogie, the whole repertoire of chaos. He knew how to get what he wanted. He made fun of the right people. There’s something about a character like that, especially when you’re young and trying to figure out if it’s okay to be the person you actually are.

I’ve watched plenty of kids’ shows, but most of them were trying to teach you something. Shin Chan was just there, doing his thing, and if you got it, you got it. You either laughed at the jokes or you didn’t. The show didn’t care.

I don’t think about it much anymore, but knowing Usui is gone—that the mind behind all that chaos decided to take a walk in the mountains and didn’t come back—there’s a finality to it that’s harder than I’d have guessed. Not grief exactly, but something like the weight of a small, permanent loss. You don’t get more Shin Chan. You just get to remember the ones you saw.