I’m Still Paying $4.50 a Month (Keroro Fan Club Mine Yoshizaki Q&A Translations, Part 3)
Another month, another round of questions! Kinda wondering how long they’ll keep this up but hey more content for me.
Q: What would Keroro, Giroro, Dororo, Kururu and Tamama each put on their fried eggs?
A: Uh, let me think about it now. Hmm… Keroro would go with salt and pepper, Giroro wouldn’t have any toppings, Dororo would put soy sauce, Kururu would be into Worcestershire sauce, and Tamama would use Krazy Salt, I guess?
Q: What’s a particular thing you really like about a certain character? Also, have you tried starfruit yourself?
A: There are a lot of characters, so this is a tough question. I guess with Natsumi-chan, for instance, I like how even though she’s always suspicious of Keroro, she’s surprisingly accepted he’ll always be planning something as long as he’s in their house and leaves him be. As for the starfruit, it was after I tried it in real life that I had Keroro eat it in the manga. I don’t think I had as strong of a reaction as Keroro, though.
Q: Could you tell us if there’s a chapter you have an emotional attachment to?
A: I would say the Easter Island chapter in Volume 15. I really tried my best to gather as much reference material as possible and depict Easter Island as accurately as I could. Also, when I visited the real place myself on a research trip later on, the tour guide was impressed with how much I knew already. That made me really happy.
Q: How does Dororo eat and drink? In the anime, there was a scene where Giroro couldn’t gargle and everyone tried to practice with him. When Mois poured water from a kettle into everyone’s mouths, Dororo wasn’t shown, so I was wondering if she ever gave him the water too (or he poured it in his mouth himself). This concerns me so much, I can’t be left alone with my thoughts.
A: So, there’s a technology in space that can temporarily allow all atoms to pass through each other. Dororo comes from a wealthy family, so I figured he would have a high-tech mask like that. Now you can rest easy! [Does he have several types of these in different styles or something…?]
Q: The hats the Keronians wear have ears on them. Is there a specific reason they’re designed like that? If not, why do you think they would have those ear flaps?
A: For some reason or another, they were designed to look like aviator hats. If I made them look as simple as possible, they’d look like the hats kindergarteners wear, but I figured that was probably okay and ended up making the current design.
[Not to pretend I’m smarter than the author himself but I’ll be honest I think he’s lying by omission here—it’s been well noted that the hats have a very uncanny resemblance to the WWII-era Japanese military hats complete with Keroro’s star and everything and I would be extremely surprised if that was unintentional. But everything on Fan Club also gets translated to Korean so I imagine he wants to publicly divorce the series from the WWII aesthetics as much as possible. I’ve heard that despite the series’s popularity in Korea with younger audiences there are still older folks who take issue with the aesthetics due to Japan’s previous atrocities against Korea, so from a business sense it makes sense that they would do this even if it’s a little bit sketch to do that imo given Japan’s history with revisionism even if I don’t think there’s malicious intent here per se. How did my personal opinion end up longer than the actual answer…]
Q: I’d like to know if there were any other motifs for the series you thought about before settling on frogs.
A: At first I considered animals that might be more popular with the general public, like cats and penguins. But then I wouldn’t be able to make the series stand out as something special. One day, I thought to myself that frogs look a bit like aliens, and that’s kinda how both the premise and the character gimmick of the series came to be.
Q: What kind of duties are the Garuru Platoon always up to?
A: They’re diligently advancing the army’s invasion work. I think they’re entrusted with tough missions the Keroro Platoon couldn’t even conceive of.
Q: In the anime, there was an episode where Giroro pointed out that Keroro and Tamama had gained weight, and in the manga, Giroro told them they were overweight and had to shed some fat. There was even a character song about Keroro going on a diet. And yet, all the Keronians’ body types look the same. So are there any differences in Keronian build?
A: As a species, Keronians have a special characteristic in that their basic body shape doesn’t change regardless of circumstance. But among themselves, they can sense little changes like if someone has developed a belly recently, for example. Maybe it’s due to differences in cell density?
Q: You’ve revealed that in the past, the Keroro Platoon infiltrated the Earth by sending the Batrachos units to investigate the planet. Back then, Natsumi and the others were still in elementary school, so did it take a long time for the platoon to get onto Earth themselves?
A: I think there was a period of several years dedicated just to investigating. During that time, they got really hooked on all the aspects of culture like manga, anime, games, and plastic models… I think they were stranded then. [Note, I’m not too sure if he’s talking about the actual platoon or the Batrachos here; might be the Batrachos given that we see one still living with a human in Vol. 26.]
Q: Tell us what your workplace looks like when you’re drawing the manga and illustrations, and what tools you use!
A: For the manga itself, I’ve always used a black mechanical pencil or regular pencil for the lineart, and a G-pen for inking. My tools for illustrations are the same when it comes to lineart, but I use Clip Studio Paint on my computer for coloring. I use a mid-sized pen tablet for that.
That’s all for this month’s installment! Let me know what you found most interesting. Or don’t.
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