#4 Morning Musume。'14 Teen Member Haruna Iikubo Shares her Love of Showa Period Manga with the World（2/3）

2014.07.16

Iikubo speaking passionately about shojo manga is no different to when all the young people around the world speak of their love for Japanese manga, and this is the very same Iikubo who leads Morning Musume。'14 as one of the group’s sub-leaders.

“I picked up a lot of knowledge on various things from reading all different types of manga as a child. It helped me learn Japanese, too. The amount of information that is packed into manga is incredible. It was thanks to manga that I was able to hold conversations on various topics with grown-ups as well. The fact that I’m able to keep up with most of the latest topics is because of manga too, I think.”

I remember an episode on one of the radio programs I MC for, when I had Masaki Tsuji, one of the leading scriptwriters in the anime industry, and Iikubo talk about manga. There’s more than a 60-year age gap between the two, and they had just met for the first time. But once they started talking about manga, it was like there was no age gap at all. Their conversation about the unrivaled appeal of Hirohiko Araki’s “JoJo no Kimyō na Bōken” was very easy to understand and it was a really great talk.

Iikubo brought in several of her favorite older manga titles.

“As for the older shonen manga, I really love Rumiko Takahashi’s “Meison Ikkoku.” I’m more from the “Inu Yasha” generation, but my dad had “Meison Ikkoku,” so that’s what I got hooked on.

Kyoko-san is the strong-willed heroine of “Meison Ikkoku,” but she also has a tendency to become irritated and jealous quite easily, and I feel like it’s these aspects of her character that allow you relate to her. Godai-kun is also a hopeless case, but he matures throughout the series and when they finally get together at the end you can’t help but shed a few tears. I also like the sub-characters, Mitaka-san and Akemi-san. I think the fact that Takahashi-san can create works of any genre that appeal to such broad audiences is incredible.”