Some of you who are more Japanese-Pop-Culture-Savvy than I am probably already recognise this little orange-clad elfin girl. You're about a half dozen steps ahead of where I've been for years.
Something on the order of four or five years ago, I was buying some jasmine tea at an Asian grocery here in town, and they had a display of keychain and cellphone charms at the register, for impulse-purchasing pleasure. I saw this adorable little orange pixie-elf with her big, round, nerd-girl glasses and impulsively added her to my ticket. I felt she was kind of an avatar, since orange is one of my favorite colors, and I had big, round, nerd-girl glasses at the time…so I thought I’d joke that she represented my whimsical and childish side. For quite a while, I had her perched on my keyboard at work, her daylily-appearance brightening my mundane work days. People sometimes asked me if she was from some cartoon or another, and I said I didn’t know…as far as I knew, she was just a cute little keitai bauble with no significance beyond being whimsical and charming.
Well.
As regular readers have discovered, I’ve become rather fond of the Japanese pop group Morning Musume, as well as several other acts associated with the Hello!Project. One of the features of Hello!Project is that they do a sort of “ratings season sweep” called the Summer Shuffles, where singers from Morning Musume and other H!P groups swap around and reform into totally different units, and produce original singles, usually with some kind of theme that unites the different groups.
In 2002, the theme was “shiawase” or “happiness/cheerfulness” and one of the shuffle units of that year was Odoru 11 (Dancing 11) whose song “Shiawase Kyouryuu Ondo” was done as a pop-music takeoff of Ondo, a traditional Japanese music style. I really like the sound of an ondo…the rhythm draws me in, and so, I thought I’d search around on YouTube and see if I could turn up any other ondos to listen to.
Oddly enough, the first ondo I came upon was something else that seemed to be aimed at a children’s market. I could see one of the girls in the weird amime suits looked suspiciously like my little orange pixie who has been riding on the strap of my camera these past three years. DoReMi, huh? Sounds a little familiar…I think I might have heard about it somewhere. A quick websearch turned up a few images…and learned that she’s a character from Ojamajo DoReMi and her name is Fujiwara Hazuki and that she does have the stereotyped nerdy-good-girl thing going on. Velma with more cuteness and more magic.
[…] might recognize the little orange fairy in the lower left corner of this tableau. I wrote about her a few years ago when I randomly discovered that she wasn’t just a miscellaneous cute figure but was actually […]