Moon Chase’s Mother’s Day Special - All About Her Mother!

Things have been crazy the last few days here, and it wasn’t until late last night an idea came to me about what to do for the Special this year. Last year’s Special was very popular and it still continues to be one of the top articles people check out. This year, we present to you, All About Her Mother, or rather, Sailor Moon’s Mother, Naoko Takeuchi!

Naoko Takeuchi was born March 15th , 1966 in Kofu city, in Yamanashi Prefecture. Her parents are Kenji and Ikuko Takeuchi, and she has a younger brother named Shingo. She named Usagi’s family after her own! She is a Pisces and if you consider Chinese astrology, her birthday falls within the lunar month of the Rabbit! She enjoys figure skating, swimming, astronomy, physics, driving, and furniture. She has interests in otaku and their culture. She is also a big fan of a very old tennis manga, Smash wo Kimero! She also has three piercings in each ear, because she likes to wear pearls. She dreamed of having a Porsche one day, and now has one which she got when she made it big with Sailor Moon! She loves comics, anime, and special effects a lot. She admires Yukio Mishima, a Japanese author who is famous for his post war works, as well as his very individual brand of nationalism. He also committed Seppuku in 1970. The inspiration for the many characters named after gems in her manga came from her visits to the Yamanashi Gem Museum. Because she was also a chemist, she understood a lot of the gems and minerals she encountered as well as their achiral and chirality and therefore named the characters accordingly.

She attended North Kofu Municipal Junior High School and later First High School in Kofu (known as Kofu Ichi High School). In High School, she was a member of the Astronomy, Geology, Festival Planning, and Manga clubs. She was a VIP with the Festival Planning committee, and she designed a poster for a high festival which was hailed as work that was beyond the level of a high school student. Naoko could really draw in her teenage years! It was because of this poster that she was noticed by a lot of people, and this lead to her eventual signing with Kodansha. Her father, though weary of the Manga industry, suggested she go to University with a backup plan in mind in case her dreams of being a Mangaka didn’t work out. At 19, Naoko Takeuchi was pursuing chemistry at the Kyoritsu College of Pharmacy in the hopes of becoming a pharmacist, but was also drawing manga on the side. Her first title, Love Call, won her Kodansha’s Best New Artist award in September of 1986! She graduated in the late 80s from Kyoritsu, and her senior thesis dealt with the field of medical use of electrical engineering or more specifically, the ultrasound. Her thesis was probably titled (though she doesn’t quite remember) Heightened Effects of Thrombolytic Actions Due to Ultrasound.After she graduated, she worked in Internal Medicine at the Jikei University School of Medicine’s Teaching Hospital. This was located in Tokyo’s Minato Ward, where Sailor Moon took place! Naoko worked on a few smaller titles, The Cherry Project, Maria, and Chocolate Christmas, and began Code Name Sailor V in 1991. Sailor Moon made her debut in 1992, and was the one big break she had been hoping for. The Smash Hit won her Kodansha’s 17th shojo manga award in 1993, and the rest as we all know is history!She married Yoshihiro Togashi, another Mangaka in 1999, and in 2001, gave birth to a son whose name has never been disclosed, though he has been nicknamed Petit Ouji (Little Prince) and more recently, Junior.

We’re not entirely sure what she is up to right now. Last we heard, she gave a lecture to business in 2005 at Ritsumeikan University. In 2006, she said that both her and Yoshihiro had a few viral infections and told their fans to wash their hands and rinse out their mouths frequently. Naoko’s blog has been discontinued from the official Sailor Moon website, and we don’t think that she is working on the Sailor Moon website, or that she is still drawing manga. Yoshihiro hasn’t mentioned her in any of his little blurbs he writes when he publishes Hunter X Hunter.

Nonetheless, on this Mother’s Day 2008, we salute Naoko Takeuchi and everything that she has bought the world through her manga, anime, and live action ventures! In honor of her on this day, we're now going to show you an old interview of hers we dug up from the glory days of Sailor Moon!