Ayumu Kasuga

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Osaka in a color insert from Azumanga Daioh.

Name translations
Chinese comic	Chūnrì Bù / Dàbǎn （春日歩/大阪）
Chinese animation	Chūnrì Bù / Běipíng →　Dàbǎn （春日歩/北平→大阪）
Korean	Maeng Sun-jeong / Busandaek （맹순정/孟純情 부산댁/釜山宅）

Ayumu Kasuga (春日歩, Kasuga Ayumu^?), more commonly known as Osaka (大阪, Ōsaka^?), is a fictional character from the anime and manga series Azumanga Daioh.

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

1 Biography
2 Voice actors
3 Character songs
4 References

[edit] Biography

Ayumu Kasuga is a transfer student from Osaka. Tomo, expecting her to act like the stereotypical Osakan (loud, exuberant and fond of bawdy jokes), quickly chose for her the nickname "Osaka," although Ayumu's behavior could not be more different from the "typical" Osakan.^[1] Ayumu considers her label "slow" and "spacey," but she lacks the energy or motivation to dispute it. Her nickname sticks so well that she becomes known as "Osaka" by the teachers and even in the class roster. After a while, no one remembers her real name (Yomi has a similar problem). In the manga, Osaka mentioned that she lived in Kobe when she was in elementary school and was born in Wakayama. Tomo, who says she doesn't know where Wakayama is, tells Ayumu to "just be Osaka".

The English dub by ADV Films equates her Kansai dialect to a Southern United States accent from around ADV's home city of Houston, Texas, "which shares the business-oriented attitude with Osaka as well as the country image that color both the Southern and Osaka accents" (as said by ADV translator notes). In the manga, which was translated first, her accent was rendered into a New York City one, which is a small tradition for anime characters with Osaka accents, such as Naru/Molly from Sailor Moon. This drew criticism because it caused Osaka to use more profanity.

Osaka often acts like a "dim bulb": slow, inattentive, and stuck in her own world. Although she seems slow and easily distracted, she merely has a mind that works quite differently from that of most people. This makes her prone to daydreaming, absentmindedness, and non-sequiturs, but it also makes her unusually good at answering certain types of riddles. But while some people assume that she lacks focus, the truth is that in quite a few cases, Osaka is really a little too focused. When she gets a thought in her head, she tends to focus on it so intently that the rest of the world simply disappears, causing her to often miss what's going on around her (an example is episode 2, when Osaka was focused on eye floaters when a cockroach invades the class and Tomo was noisily trying to exterminate the bug). She is especially close to Chiyo, since even though they are miles apart intellectually, both are bad at P.E. (Osaka is unusually stiff, even when stretching out), and both seem to approach the world with the same sense of childlike wonder and curiosity, though Chiyo's is usually tempered by common sense and information, while Osaka's is not. She also hangs out with Tomo, and, to a lesser extent, Kagura, as the "Knuckleheads" (Numbnuts in the translated manga; Bonkuras in the original Japanese), as they tend to have the worst grades out of the group.

Osaka has been known to use the phrase "O-ha!" (short for おはよう, ohayou, "good morning"), which was popularized by Shingo Katori of the pop group SMAP, as an example of how "normal" Japanese people talk. As Tomo points out, this is not a correct assumption.

At the same time, Osaka has a habit of being able to point out obvious things nobody else seems to notice (such as the fact that none of her core group of friends has boyfriends) and has surprising levels of knowledge on unexpected topics such as marine biology and obscure kanji. In the anime, she was also every bit as interested as the other girls to hear what Nyamo had to say about sex. However, her sense of humor is sometimes unusually morbid. On their first trip to Chiyo's summer home, Osaka proposed telling a scary story where all of the girls are murdered one by one, only to reveal that in the end, she was the one who killed them all. She is also easily amused by things that most people would consider bizarre. During the Sports Festival, she made a big deal out of running the obstacle course because she thought the event of sticking her face in flour to get a candy was funny and had a giggle fit when she got there. The manga also revealed that she actually likes to run outside and play in typhoons.

In the final entrance exams storyarc, Osaka asks for advice from Chiyo on a future career and cheerfully accepts the suggestion to be a schoolteacher, a decision Yukari sees as a profound, personal insult.