Totoko Yowai

Totoko Yowai is a character in Osomatsu-Kun. Her name derives from the word for "weak", yowai (弱井) as well as a childish word for fish, "toto" (トト).

Overview
Totoko is a young girl living in the same neighborhood as the sextuplets, and is usually set as the daughter of the local fishmonger. Yet with the intentional lack of continuity between manga stories, the above setting is not always in play and she may sometimes be the daughter of another character.

Sometimes her age and very personality may vary through different stories and media as well. For instance, in the final story of the Shonen Sunday run of the manga, she is shown to be an adult secretary of Dekapan.

Her first appearance in the Osomatsu-kun series happened more than a month after the debut of Akatsuka's newer series Akko-chan's Got a Secret! in Ribon, along with its identical protagonist that Akatsuka re-used the design of for her. According to Akatsuka, this is because when he drew a gentle face for the character, the rest of Akko's design wound up naturally being recycled.

At the very time of Totoko's creation, Akatsuka's assistant in -kun had also happened to have been his wife Tomoko. As her name was reflected in the characters of Moko in Akko-chan and in Tomoko in O-chan's Eleven Friends, with both running in the same interval, Totoko's name may have also been inspired by her but altered to fit the "fishmonger's daughter" setting.

Appearance
Totoko is slender and somewhat taller than the sextuplets, as is the case of various Akatsuka heroines' proportions. She wears her hair tied back into a pair of pigtails, and her hair at the top of her head rests in a large swell (depicted alternatively as a bouffant or bun, or actually as part of her skull in a 1988 episode) with a headband worn over it. The color of her headband and ribbons vary depending on the artwork, but it is common to see the headband depicted as red or pink and the ribbons as yellow. The color of her hair is usually black in the manga, but can be depicted a deep brown like in the 1988 series and in -san.

In the -kun manga and the 1966 anime, she can be seen in a variety of dresses and jumper skirts. The 1988 series often has her wearing a deep reddish-pink jumper skirt over a lighter pink blouse.

Personality
In the original manga, Totoko is a kind-hearted, serious and friendly sort of girl, but with very little patience for being let down or having to deal with the sextuplets' trouble. When angered, she shows her tomboyish side and gets violent, showcasing her "body blow". Her more violent temper gradually subsided to where she was more often depicted as an ordinary girl above the sextuplets, though still capable of getting frustrated and jealous.

By the third run in the 1980s, Totoko is depicted as a heroine but also capable of joining in on the sextuplets' bullying of Iyami, and committing other chaotic acts, such as scamming men and attempting to skip out on a restaurant bill under the false name of "Secret of Akko-chan". Her language also becomes rougher.

She is noted to be quite terrible at cooking, though she is said to be good at school work.

1988 anime adaptation
However, this specific animated series presents somewhat of a departure in her characterization: Although depicted milder in the earlier episodes, the series more often wound up depicting her as a vain, greedier, selfish girl fixated on money and glory. As a result, this often put her in a more comic relief type of role. A writer for the show named Kazuhisa Sakaguchi would recall the Yomiko producer Kyotaro Kimura being keen on redoing her character at the meetings for developing the show, with him stating that "Totoko seems to have an absolutely terrible personality" in his perception of the original manga and as basis for why it was okay to portray her even more over-the-top. The casting of Naoko Matsui in the role sealed this fate, as Matsui was told by Kimura that Totoko would be the closest to her type, and the character's wild and unpredictable nature grew more as the staff tailored her to the usual type of girls Matsui was known to play.

While seen as a grade-schooler or to be assumed as such in most stories in that version, she is at times also depicted owning her own businesses or appearing to be aged up somewhat in professions such as a nurse, stewardess, or hostess. She lives to be complimented, and in one instance plays along with Iyami's feelings for her so she can get the money from his winning lottery ticket. She takes being ignored by the sextuplets even worse than she does in previous incarnations, becoming vengeful and finding her position as a "#1 idol" threatened. She's also depicted as going as far as to attempt to murder the sextuplets if she feels wronged and spurned by them, as seen in "Sextuplets Squared!".

Although this becomes the main type of setting for that version of Totoko, there are occasional episodes that depict her as more true to the manga and a more innocent character type, such as in "Chibita the Safe-Cracker" and "White Christmas of the Skyline", the latter depicting her as a singer who must regain her confidence. There are also episodes in which she may bear both a more heroic slant as well as a mischievous personality, such as "The Tomboy Princess of Dekapan Castle" and "Totoko, the Riddling Genius".

To go with the trends of the 1980s in Japan, she is at one point shown as a fan of the boy band Hikaru Genji. She also incorporates "Nori-P language" (used by the idol Noriko Sakai) into her dialogue.