40 Fun Facts About Crayon Shin-chan

Which name belongs to Shin-chan's baby sister, the youngest member of the Nohara family?

Himawari, meaning sunflower, was a name sent in by viewers after the show put out a public call for suggestions, which makes the youngest Nohara a fan-named character.

What did Kasukabe grant the fictional Nohara family in 2004 for its 50th anniversary?

A special resident certificate registered the Noharas at a made-up Kasukabe address as part of the city's 50th-anniversary events. The creator himself grew up in Kasukabe and went to school there.

In 1993 Shin-chan appeared as a special guest on which year-end Japanese music show?

Kōhaku Uta Gassen, NHK's New Year's Eve song contest, had the cartoon kindergartner sing his own theme 'Ora wa Ninkimono' in a stage-show segment.

What is the name of the puppy Shin-chan adopted after finding him abandoned in a box by the road?

Shiro is often the cleverest member of the Nohara household, showing logic that outstrips his owners, and has learned to forage because the family keeps forgetting to feed him.

Which TV superhero is five-year-old Shinnosuke Nohara's great idol in Crayon Shin-chan?

Action Kamen, called Action Mask in English, is the hero Shin-chan worships; he fought the Leotard Devil in the first Shin-chan film in 1993 and later won a spin-off manga of his own.

Which actress voiced Shin-chan from 1992 until June 2018, having also played Relena Peacecraft in Gundam Wing?

Akiko Yajima gave Shin-chan his voice for 26 years and stepped down in June 2018, explaining that it had become hard to keep producing his voice and still act naturally.

Which network has aired the Crayon Shin-chan anime since April 1992 and has wholly owned its studio since 2010?

TV Asahi has carried Shin-chan for well over a thousand episodes and in 2010 bought the studio behind it outright, the same house that animates Doraemon.

Which 2001 Shin-chan film centres on a 20th-century expo that trades on nostalgia?

The Adult Empire Strikes Back turns the usual order upside down: with the parents lost in nostalgia, Shin-chan and his kindergarten friends are the ones who have to bring them home.

Which Indian children's channel launched a Hindi dub of Shin-chan in June 2006?

Hungama TV put the Hindi dub on air every weekday from 19 June 2006, until parents' complaints to India's broadcasting ministry took the show off the air for a time in late 2008.

Which artist created Crayon Shin-chan after attending a technical high school in the city where the series is set?

Yoshito Usui graduated from Kasukabe's technical high school in 1977 and set his strip in the city; after his death in 2009 his former staff carried it on as New Crayon Shin-chan.

The creator of Crayon Shin-chan died in September 2009 after falling from a cliff on which Gunma mountain?

Mount Arafune is where searchers found the cartoonist a week after his family reported him missing from a hike; his recovered camera's final frame had been taken from the cliff top.

Crayon Shin-chan debuted in 1990 in which seinen anthology, which passed the strip to a monthly stablemate in 2000?

Weekly Manga Action, a magazine aimed at adult men, is where a kindergartner's antics first ran, and the strip stayed there until 2000 before moving to the monthly Manga Town.

Under which name has the late creator's staff drawn the continuation New Crayon Shin-chan since 2010?

UY Studio shares the byline with the late creator on New Crayon Shin-chan, which began in the monthly Manga Town in August 2010 and has since left print for its own website.

Which publisher, whose name Shin-chan's anime kindergarten echoes, has issued the manga since 1990?

Futabasha has published Shin-chan since 1990 and kept it going after its creator died in 2009, with his former staff drawing a sequel series. The anime's Futaba Kindergarten shares its name.

Which college student is five-year-old Shin-chan's great crush in Crayon Shin-chan?

Nanako Ohara is the person the shameless Shin-chan puts on his best behaviour for.

Before his manga debut, the creator of Crayon Shin-chan joined a company in 1979 in which line of work?

Advertising paid the bills from 1979: he made point-of-purchase signs for supermarkets, and a supermarket became the setting of the strip that launched him as a cartoonist in 1987.

In October 2019 Crayon Shin-chan and Doraemon moved together from Friday nights to which day of the week?

Saturday afternoons became the pair's home in 2019, a day Shin-chan had last held from 2002 to 2004; it left Fridays with a 'moving day' episode in September.

Which Chiba-born actress took over as Shin-chan's voice in July 2018, after 26 years of one performer?

Yumiko Kobayashi said she felt both the honour and the weight of the responsibility, and prepared by rewatching the series from its first episode before her debut on July 6, 2018.

What do Shin-chan and his kindergarten friends, four boys and one girl, call their gang in Crayon Shin-chan?

Kasukabe Defence Force holds its strategy meetings at a 'secret base', though the five mostly just play together, and its lone girl member is outnumbered four to one.

Which of Shin-chan's kindergarten friends attends cram school and hides a love of cartoons?

Toru Kazama counts Shin-chan as his best friend, however firmly he denies it in public.

Which girl among Shin-chan's kindergarten friends vents her anger by punching a stuffed rabbit, just as her mother does?

Nene Sakurada likes nothing better than making the boys act out 'real house', her soap-opera take on playing house, and is not above using the game as a threat.

Which 24-year-old teacher runs the Rose Class at Shin-chan's kindergarten and feuds with his own class teacher?

Ume Matsuzaka says she dislikes teaching at the kindergarten and plans to move somewhere better, yet when a better-paying kindergarten tried to recruit her she turned it down.

Why do strangers keep misjudging the principal of Shin-chan's kindergarten, a man who is actually kind and optimistic?

His yakuza-like appearance scares people who only see him walk past, and his name, Bunta Takakura, is said to come from Bunta Sugawara and Ken Takakura, stars of gangster films.

Which vegetable does Shin-chan famously refuse to eat in Crayon Shin-chan?

Green bell peppers are the one food listed as Shin-chan's dislike, an odd blind spot for a boy otherwise drawn as a glutton like his mother.

Which snack does Shin-chan forever beg for in Crayon Shin-chan, his favourite treat of all?

Chocobi, the chocolate biscuits Shin-chan loves, crossed over into real shops: Lotte first sold a Chocobi in 1993, and Bandai Namco counts its Chocobi packs in the hundreds of millions.

Which Shin-chan character fell silent when actor Kaneto Shiozawa died in 2000, until Hiroshi Kamiya took over in 2016?

Buriburizaemon went sixteen years with barely a speaking role, surfacing only as a set of evil clones in the SHIN-MEN episodes, before a new 2016 episode brought him back for good.

Shin-chan's father Hiroshi comes from a village near Omagari in which northern prefecture?

Akita is Hiroshi's home prefecture, and trouble travels south from it: whenever his father comes to stay in Kasukabe, his antics are a standing headache for Hiroshi and Misae.

Shin-chan's mother Misae grew up in Aso, a volcanic caldera region of which prefecture on Kyushu?

Kumamoto is Misae's home prefecture; her 'Aso City' was invented for the strip before a real city of Aso existed, and that city, formed by a 2005 merger, has since used the Noharas in its tourism campaigns.

Which voice actor played Shin-chan's father Hiroshi from 1992 until 2016, when Toshiyuki Morikawa took over the role?

Keiji Fujiwara voiced Hiroshi for 24 years until he took leave for medical treatment in 2016, and he died in April 2020; father and son changed voices within two years of each other.

A 2015 spin-off manga, adapted as an anime series in 2025, follows Shin-chan's father doing what?

Eating his lunches is the whole premise of Nohara Hiroshi Hirumeshi no Ryūgi, a salaryman's meal-by-meal diary that ran in Manga Town for eight years before moving online.

What does Shin-chan's salaryman father do with his entire take-home pay each month?

Gives it all to his wife: Misae runs the household budget and hands him back a monthly allowance, a sum the two regularly argue about.

Which Nohara grandfather's loose public manners keep him arguing with Misae's strict retired-teacher father?

Ginnosuke, Hiroshi's father, shares his son's and grandson's weakness for flirting with women, which is exactly the conduct the stricter maternal grandfather cannot abide.

Which 2002 Shin-chan film won the Japan Media Arts Festival's animation Grand Prize?

The Battle of the Warring States was the last Shin-chan film painted on traditional cels, and its story was remade as the 2009 live-action romance Ballad.

Which Doraemon alumnus, later the director of Colorful and Miss Hokusai, made the 2001 and 2002 Shin-chan films?

Keiichi Hara became the series' director in October 1996; the 2001 film won the praise that raised his profile, and the 2002 film was the last he wrote and directed for the series.

Which studio has released every Crayon Shin-chan film since 1993?

Toho has handled every Shin-chan film since the first, which opened in July 1993; every one from 1994 to 2019 then opened in April, just ahead of Japan's Golden Week holiday.

In which city was Crayon Shin-chan's creator born, before his family moved to Kasukabe?

Shizuoka City is the cartoonist's birthplace, but he grew up in Saitama's Kasukabe and made that city the Nohara family's home.

Which food flies in the subtitle of Crayon Shin-chan's first 3D CG feature film, released in 2023?

Sushi takes off in Battle of Supernatural Powers ~Flying Sushi~, in which a strange light gives Shin-chan psychic powers and a dark one arms a man bent on destruction.

Shin-chan first aired in Spain in April 2001 on the new channel K3, which broadcast in which regional language?

Catalan-language K3 launched on 23 April 2001 with Shin-chan on its schedule from the first day, and other regional channels picked the series up before national television did.

Funimation's English dub of Shin-chan, which wrapped with a third season in 2011, aired on which US late-night block?

Adult Swim carried a dub that rewrote the scripts with darker, more mature jokes, and the English manga later borrowed that dub's style of humour.

Which DC Comics manga imprint acquired Crayon Shin-chan in 2007 and issued an uncensored, Mature-rated English edition?

CMX put out the first volume in February 2008, and One Peace Books later reprinted that same translation in omnibus form from 2012.