“Lucky☆Star” and the City of Moe, Kuki
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Post card with date stamp is given from the museum. |
Lucky Star (らき☆すた,) is a Japanese four-panel comic strip manga by Kagami Yoshimizu. The strip has been serialized in Kadokawa Shoten‘s Comptiq magazine since January 2004. Cameo strips were published in other magazines such as Shōnen Ace and others. Like many four-panel comic strips, it has no ongoing plot, and typically focuses on the daily lives of the characters.
Lucky Star’s story mainly portrays the lives of four Japanese girls attending a Japanese high school. The setting is mainly based on the city of Kasukabe in Saitama Prefecture. The main character is Konata Izumi, an athletic and somewhat intelligent (even though she likes to copy), but also slightly mischievous and laid-back girl who, despite these attributes, is not in a sports club and has to resort to all-nighter cramming for tests. She would rather read manga and play video games than do her homework.
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The high school in Kasukabe where the four main characters attend. |
The serialization began with the four main characters in their first year of high school: Konata Izumi, Kagami Hiiragi, Tsukasa Hiiragi, and Miyuki Takara. As the story progresses, they move on to their second and third years. However, the anime starts the story with them beginning their second year, and the other high school girls that are seen in the opening are only introduced halfway through the series. The storyline usually includes numerous references to popular past and present manga, anime and tokusatsu series.
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Kagami Yoshimizu’s Museum in Satte Town |
The popularity of “Lucky Star” has caused fans to rush to the setting of the manga, Satte and Washinomiya Town in Kuki City, Saitama. Creator Kagami Yoshimizu’s （美水かがみ）own childhood home in Satte Town has been turned into a museum featuring a number of exhibits sure to recreation of the bedroom of “Lucky☆Star’s” main character, Konata Izumi.
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Kagami Yoshimizu (美水かがみ), born October 7, 1977, is a Japanese manga author from Satte Town, Kuki City, Saitama, Japan. He is perhaps most well-known as the creator of a four-panel comic strip Lucky ☆ Star which has been serialized in Kadokawa Shoten‘s Comptiq magazine since January 2004. He is also credited for creating Comptiq’s mascot character Comp-chan (コンプちゃん,).
Washinomiya Town contains what is said to be the oldest shrine in the Kanto region, and because it is also the place where the Hiiragi twin sisters work as the shrine maidens in the story, it has now become a destination for sites of pilgrimages. Washinomiya Shrine gets lively on the weekends when a throng of fans gather around its precincts.
Washinomiya Shrine (鷲宮神社,) is located in Kuki, Saitama (Formerly Washimiya), Japan.The oldest record of the shrine was found in the Azuma Kagami, the official historical record for the Kamakura Shogunate. It had the patronage of the Imperial family, foreign VIPs, and even Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu. Various folk-culture and performing art events, including the Saibara-Kagura Festival are held here. Its traditional dance handed down through generations has been designated as a national intangible folk-culture asset. The shrine also houses several ancient relics.
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Torii gate of Washinomiya Shrine and Ema |
This shot is redrawn in the opening animation of the anime Lucky Star.
The August 2007 issue of the Newtype magazine ran an article on the various locales featuring in the popular anime and manga Lucky Star, and provided directions on how to reach these places from the otaku hotspot Akihabara, including the Washinomiya Shrine which had its torii shown in the opening sequence and featured the Hiiragi sisters working as miko in the anime.
Shortly afterwards, massive otaku pilgrimages to the shrine became the most widely reported consequence of the feature’s publication. It became a place teeming with photographers trying to replicate scenes from the anime, cosplayers wandering around, and prayer plaques ridden with anime drawings and strange prayers like “Konata is my wife“.
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＜Reference materials＞
Japan Anime Tourism Guide published by Japan Tourism Agency
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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