Category Archives: Characters

Is Usagi Really Just an Average Girl?

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Usagi at Home

Nearly every act of the Sailor Moon manga begins with Usagi introducing herself as “just an average junior high school girl.”  We see that she lives in a typical nuclear family with two parents and two children, one boy and one girl.  They live in a modest home with one car and she goes to a public junior high school.  Aside from her well-established abysmal grades, the Tsukino family is pretty much statistically average, isn’t it?  Well, it certainly looks like it, but the facts don’t actually pan out that way when you look beyond the surface.

First off, regarding Usagi’s family, Ms. Takeuchi actually modeled the makeup of it after her own, even down to the names of her mother and father (Ikuko and Kenji) and younger brother, Shingo.  Though the birth rate has been on the decline since 1973, in 1992 (when Sailor Moon takes place), households with two children still edged out single-child households,1 so at the very least this part of the “average girl” story works out. Now how do things work out with her living situation?

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Why Does Usagi Say Her Stomach is Trumpeting?

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In the original run of the Sailor Moon anime, Usagi will occasionally say the hard to understand (and even harder to translate) line about her stomach playing a trumpet:

Japanese:  「おなかのラッパがプー」 (onaka no rappa ga pu~)
Literal Translation: “My stomach’s playing the trumpet”
Localization: “I’m laughing so hard, my tummy hurts!” / “My tummy’s singing!” / Etc.

On the surface of it, and depending on context, it sounds like she’s saying that her stomach’s rumbling, but as you watch through the series, you realize that she uses it more like a personal catch-phrase and not with any one, specific meaning. For example, this phrase comes out both when she’s yelling at Mamoru1 and again later when she’s on her way to lunch and can’t wait to start eating.2

Usagi and Her Trumpeting Stomach (Episode 11; 9m23s)

Usagi and Her Trumpeting Stomach (Episode 11; 9m23s)

So what is this, just another Japanese idiom that doesn’t actually translate well into English? Actually, the story behind it is more interesting than that. It turns out that it wasn’t originally part of the script and was said to be an ad lib on the part of Usagi’s voice actress, Kotono Mitsuishi, in the middle of Usagi’s tirade against Mamoru shown in the image above. But that isn’t where this catch phrase actually really originated.

Actually, this phrase first came about in the manga/anime known as Goldfish Warning!3 and was often uttered by the overly active Wapiko.

Wapiko of Goldfish Report!

Wapiko of Goldfish Warning!

After the anime ended, most of the animation staff (including director Junichi Sato and music composer Takanori Arisawa) moved over to the the Sailor Moon anime, which led to the appearance of many references to this series throughout the first season of Sailor Moon. From thereon, the phrase took on a life of its own, and has become one of the many Usagi-isms that continue to appear throughout the entire run of the anime.

Though this doesn’t really explain what your stomach trumpeting has to do with being emotional or agitated, it’s nice to know the story behind it!

Why Does Makoto Live Alone?

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Though families play a relatively minor role in the Sailor Moon universe – indeed, other than Usagi’s parents and Rei’s grandfather, the rest are only mentioned in passing – the story behind Makoto’s family is particularly troubling. We see from her first appearance that she had transferred from another school (though we never really learn the details behind that) and learn that she lives alone, though we know very little beyond that.  How is it that a junior high school girl can live alone and unsupervised?  And for that matter, how is she even paying for this apartment?

Though we later learn that she lost her family to a plane crash “at a young age,” that’s as far as the manga, anime, or live action series go into it.  However, by taking a look back into Japan’s recent past, we may be able to unravel this mystery, or at least get closer to an answer.

Fortunately, Japan has had relatively few domestic plane crashes that resulted in deaths. Assuming a basis in the real world (which is a fair assumption, thanks in part to the detailed research Ms. Takeuchi did when creating the world of Sailor Moon and for the reasons described below), this makes it possible to narrow down actual dates and give us an age for Makoto at the time the tragedy hit.

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