Interview with Miho Nakazono in " Anpan ": Why she chose her model, Kaho, as her model

Miho Nakazono is the scriptwriter for the NHK Asadora drama "Anpan " (General TV, Monday to Saturday, 8:00 AM and other times), starring Mio Imada The 109th episode, which aired on August 28th, depicted Nakazato Kaho ( Yuzuna Nagase ), a girl who sent a fan letter to Takashi ( Takumi Kitamura ), visiting the Yanai family. We spoke to Nakazono about the reasons for including Kaho, who is modeled after herself, in the drama and her aims.

" Anpan" is based on the married couple Takashi Yanase(1919-2013), the manga artist and picture book author who created "Anpanman," and his wife, Nobu (1918-1993). It is a "story of love and courage" that will fill you with the joy of living, depicting how these two, who were once nobodys, overcame all sorts of rough seas to become "Anpanman," the embodiment of "unreversible justice."

In episode 109, one day, elementary school student Nakazato Kaho, who had read Taka's poetry collection "Beloved Songs" and sent him a fan letter, visits the Yanai family with her grandfather, Sunao (Asano Kazuyuki). Nobu (Imada) and Taka greet them with smiles, but the two are taken aback by Kaho's harsh words, without a smile. While Kaho and Ranko (Yuumi Kawai) hit it off over talk of movies and other topics, Sunao tells Nobu and Taka about a difficult experience Kaho had, and expresses his gratitude for Taka's poetry collection, saying it saved him...

Nakazono read Yanase's poetry collection "Aisuru Uta" when she was in the fourth grade of elementary school, and sent him a fan letter, which led to their correspondence. Nakazono, who lost her father at the age of 10, recalls, "I was deeply comforted when I read Yanase's poem, 'Born alone, dying alone, Humans are so lonely, Humans are so strange.'"

She has actually met Yanase, but laughs, saying, "I wasn't that rude."

"When there's a real-life model, you can't write anything bad about it. I have to be careful about how my family will feel when they see it. However, I like writing characters with very strong personalities, so I thought I'd like to write a character who is a complete brat (laughs). I thought it would be okay if I was the model, so I made myself as cheeky as possible."

Regarding the character of Kaho, she revealed, "It felt good to write the character because she would just say whatever she was thinking."

"At that point, I thought to myself, 'You shouldn't be living in such a rundown apartment in the first place,' and if 10-year-old me had visited, I would have thought, 'Wow, you live in such a rundown place,' (laughs). I don't think I would have actually said it out loud, but I had the characters say everything they thought in the drama, and it felt really good."

Regarding the aim of this scene, she said, "It's true that even a cheeky kid like me was saved by Yanase's poetry. I thought that we couldn't leave that out in the drama either. After all, a weirder kid makes for a more interesting drama, and I thought that Yanase's words would reach even kids like that, so I wrote it without exaggerating."