TriviAqours Vol. 5 – Suwa Nanaka

Good evening and welcome back to TriviAqours! If you don’t know about this fun segment, I teamed up with my good friend Leap250 to give you some information and fun trivia facts about the voices behind the characters of the Love Live! Sunshine!! series. We started this a few weeks ago when Aqours finished up their 3rd Live concert in Fukuoka, and it definitely has been a fun journey so far!

If you missed them, we have already covered four seiyuu out of the nine, them being Saitou Shuka, Aida Rikako, Takatsuki Kanako, and Komiya Arisa. This week, I’ll be talking about who I originally going to discuss last week, the lovely Suwa Nanaka!

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Suwa “Suwawa” Nanaka

• Born November 2, 1994
• Image color is green
• Height: 157 cm/5’1.8”
• Talents include dance, piano, calligraphy, speaking English
• Hobbies are watching movies and anime, playing games, taking walks, sleeping late
• Favorite food is ice cream
• Voices Matsuura Kanan in Love Live! Sunshine!!, as well as minor anime roles in Gabriel Dropout, Typhoon Noruda, World War Blue

1. We Need to Go Wider

Suwawa is an avid fan of watching anime and reading manga, and she has stated that one of her favorites is the series Hidamari Sketch, a 4-koma manga by Aoki Ume and adapted by studio Shaft. She has even said that “it was the first time in my life I was really engrossed in an anime” and “that was the trigger that gave rise to the feel that I wanted to become a seiyuu”. Her favorite seiyuu, Gotou Yoko, played Hiro in that series; and she actually worked on something alongside the seiyuu of one of the main characters Yuno, Asumi Kana.

2. The Beginnings of Nanaka

Before being casted as Matsuura Kanan in Sunshine!!, Suwawa attended seiyuu school during her second year of junior high (around age 8-9). I’d imagine it was pretty tough, given that all she could think about while going to seiyuu school was “I can’t do this anymore”.

Other than seiyuu academy, she has been involved with various anime roles, radio shows, and sung a few songs such as this one, “Amazing Happy Man!!!!!”.

3. Let’s Hug

Suwawa’s call-and-response begins with “Minnasan, gokigen ikaga kanan?” (How are you, everyone?), then the audience replies with “Daibu ii kanji~” (Doing great!). Suwawa then says “Yoshi, ja, haggu shiyo!” (Alright, give me a hug!) and [usually] hugs the nearest Aqours seiyuu, it most likely being Shuka [at least in the Niconama streams]. During concerts, she may change it up such as running all the way to the other side to hug one of the first years, or even takes the time to hug all of them. But as we have seen in past events, not everyone gets the holy opportunity to get a hug from Suwawa and you can tell that every single seiyuu would love one.

4. Rank 1000

I believe most people reading this (assuming most people are Love Livers already) play or at least know the popular rhythm game of Love Live! School idol festival for mobile devices. Many of the Aqours seiyuu got into the LL phenomenon just from the mobile game, and Suwawa is one of them. As a matter of fact, she’s considered one of, if not, THE best at the game out of all the Aqours seiyuu (she plays the expert difficulty most of the time, if you wanted to know).

She has been seen doing really good during the SIF segments during Aqours Niconamas, as well as public events/videos promoting the arcade version of the game, Love Live! School idol festival ~after school ACTIVITY.

5. NanaAinya

It doesn’t really matter what entertainment fandom/community you’re in, shipping characters/people is something you can’t get away from. Love Live is no different.

While shipping the characters is more well-known/popular, I and many others like to ship the seiyuus instead (and I know there’s a whole debate on if shipping seiyuus is okay, I can save that for another discussion). One of the more well-known and loved ships is the NanaAinya one, the pairing of Suwawa and the seiyuu of Ohara Mari, Suzuki Aina.

It’s probably one of the Aqours ships that they don’t try to avoid/hide, as they keep adding fuel to the fire whether it be Suwawa carrying Ainya during an Aqours Fan Meeting, taking cute pictures together, or even Suwawa neglecting Arisha on purpose to hug Ainya when she does her call-and-response (because Arisha is in the middle of those two in the member lineup). I don’t have a legit source when I say this but Suwawa herself knows about the ship and officially calls it “NanaAinya” as well.

6. Suwa’s Puroland

If you don’t know what Puroland is, it’s a theme park in Japan with a ton of Sanrio-related (the creators of Hello Kitty) attractions and opportunities to meet and take pictures with various Sanrio characters like Hello Kitty and Co.

Suwawa is a HUGE fan of Sanrio, as we can see on her social media photos, and even had the opportunity to hold an event at Puroland (named “Suwawa in PUROLAND). She also one time went with fellow Aqours member Rikyako and Kobayashi Aika (voice of Tsushima Yoshiko), and had a blast. I’m not too educated on the Sanrio/Puroland characters and the fact that she takes pictures with different ones each time so I can’t really say which one is Suwawa’s favorite.

7. Suwawa and the Kanan Nesoberi

Nesoberis, also called Nesoberi nuigurumis, are plush toys of characters lying on their stomachs and have pupil-less eyes. They come in many different shapes and sizes, from a keychain to a regular sized one to a jumbo sized Neso to even a giant inflatable Takami Chika one the Love Live staff put on the beach in front of Chika’s house from the anime for April Fool’s Day. If I’m not mistaken, the first and main lineup of Nesoberis were of Love Live characters, both μ’s and Aqours. Many, many fans have these huggable plushies of their favorite Love Live girl and it’s surprising I haven’t bought one of Watanabe You yet.

But back to the Suwawa facts, she owns a Neso of her LL character, Kanan, and has stated that she puts it on her bed and sleeps next to it. She even sometimes speaks to Kanan, one example being when the Nesos fell off her bed, Suwawa said to them, “Hey – you fell off.” and put them back. She claims that this is one of the ways that makes her feel/become closer to the character of Kanan.

8. Suwa-Swole

One of Suwawa’s goals in 2017 was to improve her physical strength and even wanted to gain some muscles and maybe some abs as well. This is another way Suwawa wanted to get closer to Kanan, since as you may know, Kanan is a pretty athletic lady.

However, it seems like Suwawa “gave up halfway throughout the year”.

9. Hello, Everyone!

Other than Rikyako (and if you want to include Ainya/Mari and her “Engrish”), Suwawa is pretty dang good at speaking English. It hasn’t been shown too much at Love Live events, other than when Kanan was Australia’s Worldwide “Image Girl”, as well as the Aqours events here in the United States at Anime Expo but even from those, it’s shown that Suwawa has a really good grasp at the English language.

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Hope you learned a little more about Suwawa this week! There are so many things about Suwawa to love but one of my favorites is that “HAPPY PARTY TRAIN” is probably one of my all-time favorite Aqours songs out of the bunch (and I’ve been doing a terrible job keeping up with their discography), and she definitely kills it as the center.

Be sure to catch Vol. 6 on Leap’s blog, by clicking here!

Thanks for reading!! 😀

-al