Doraemon has no visible fingers, yet he pulls huge gadgets from a small pocket, eats plates of dorayaki, and even holds a pen. The round white hands have puzzled viewers for decades. Official Doraemon guidebooks and a real engineering project in Japan both offer a clear answer to how those hands work — and why a team of researchers built a robot hand that looks and behaves almost the same way.
The Official Name Is ‘Petari Hand’
Doraemon’s hands are not a drawing mistake. The official Doraemon Encyclopedia from Shogakukan, first published in 2001, calls them “Petari Hand” (ぺたりハンド), a soft, rubber-like round hand that can stick to objects. The guidebook says the hand has a force that attracts things, which is why Doraemon can hold items without wrapping fingers around them.
A TBS radio children’s question corner once asked Doraemon directly about this. The character answered in simple words:
“My hands are called ‘Petta Hand.’ They are made so that I can hold various things without gripping, by sticking to them.”
The same TBS discussion included Nobuyo Ōyama, the voice actress who played Doraemon from 1979 to 2005. She explained one everyday problem with the design:
“When digging holes, Doraemon’s small round hands spin and slip, so there is a gadget called ‘Mogura Hand’ that can dig with great force.”
That gadget exists in the story because the round hands are not built for every task. They are built for holding.
Why Fingers Sometimes Appear on Screen
Doraemon’s hands look completely round in most manga panels and anime episodes. A small number of scenes show short fingers appearing when he uses a gun-type gadget or presses a button. Fans have long debated whether these are animation errors or a hidden feature.
The 1995 short anime “2112: The Birth of Doraemon” gave the clearest answer. The film shows Doraemon’s internal mechanical body with fingers and toes, covered by a white high-tech film. The round shape is the outer cover, not the whole hand. The Doraemon Encyclopedia also notes that small thumb-like structures can appear for tasks that suction cannot handle, such as turning a screw or pushing a button.
The round shape itself has a story reason. Japanese Doraemon lore says the hands are round because Doraemon is a caretaker robot for children, and round hands are safer than sharp fingers.
A Real ‘Doraemon Hand’ Built at Tohoku University
The question of how a fingerless round hand can grip objects is not only for anime fans. Engineers have asked the same question. A team led by Associate Professor Kenjiro Tadakuma at Tohoku University in Japan built a soft, fingerless robotic hand that Japanese media jokingly called the “Doraemon hand.”
The hand is a round rubbery shape with no fingers. Inside the rubber membrane is a filling of ground coffee beans. When the hand is not holding anything, the coffee grounds behave like a soft liquid, so the hand can change shape and wrap around an object. When air is pumped out, the grounds pack tightly together and become hard, locking the object in place. The process is called jamming transition.
The numbers from the research are easy to picture. The hand can deform with about 3 newtons of force, roughly the effort needed to press a small object. After gripping, it can hold 30 newtons without changing shape, which is more than ten times stronger. In tests, it lifted an object weighing 1.3 kilograms and pressed the button of an electrical cabinet. The design is meant for disaster rescue work, where a robot may need to pick up unknown objects without knowing their shape in advance.
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Other Real Hands Built Along the Same Lines
The Tohoku project is not the only real-world attempt to copy Doraemon’s grip. In 2016, a group of students at Singapore Polytechnic created a wearable assistive gripper called “Doraemon’s Hand.” It was designed to help people with an upper limb amputation or limited hand dexterity pick up everyday objects.
Earlier, in 2010, researchers at the University of Chicago showed a round robot hand filled with coffee grounds that could grip raw eggs and other delicate items. The same jamming principle was used. The repeated interest from engineers shows that Doraemon’s fingerless design is not just a cute drawing choice — it points to a real way of holding things that is simple, soft, and adaptable.
What the Hands Mean for the Story
Doraemon’s round hands are part of his character. They explain why he always throws rock in rock-paper-scissors, why he needs special gadgets for digging, and why he can still pull a dorayaki from a plate without a single finger. The official guidebooks, the 1995 origin anime, and the Tohoku University robot hand all point to the same idea: the hand is a soft, suction-based tool that can change shape when needed. The anime takes that idea into the future. Real engineers are already building a version for the present.
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