InoShikaChou

Down near the bottom of the linked page (20061127.1950), Steven Den Beste talks about a set of characters from Kamichu, “Team Good Fortune”:

I think they tried to make each one a pun. For instance, when she names Chou, she says, “Your advice was very useful.” I think the word she used in there was chouhou, which means ?? “usefulness”, or maybe ?? “handy, convenient”. But chou also means ? “butterfly”, and that’s what Chou-chan is.

For Ino, I think Yurie says, “Ki ni shi nakute ii no”, and then decides on “Ino” for his name. But ? inoshishi means “wild boar”.

I’ve listened to the section where Shika gets his name three times and I cannot pick out any reason for why she names him, except the obvious one: shika means “deer”, which is what he is. She says it’s a punishment, however. (He’d just insulted her handwriting.)

Chou-chan gets her name at 1:30:10. Ino gets his at 1:34:32. Shika is at 1:36:13. Those are all time offsets on DVD 1 of the series. Anyone who has a better ear care to help me out with this?

I don’t own the series in question, and I don’t know Japanese, but those names ring a very big bell to me. If you’ve seen much Naruto, they should to you, too:

Above we’ve got Akimichi Chouji, Nara Shikamaru, and Yamanaka Ino, along with their teacher Sarutobi Asuma. Or, in other words, Team InoShikaChou.

Checking a little bit, it appears that Kamichi is young enough that, in theory, its characters could be a reference to Naruto, though the choice of genders would be odd in that case. I find it much more likely, however, that instead both are referencing some other source, perhaps a famous Japanese story. It would certainly fit with Kishimoto’s naming practices; most names in Naruto are some form of pun, and the names (and partially the characters) of the Legendary Sannin are lifted from an old Japanese story.

So, it’s not really an answer to the original question, but it might be a fruitful avenue of investigation.

UPDATE: Unsurprisingly, Steven Den Beste has the answer (20061216.2130):

Actually, as best I’ve been able to determine, those are both references to a Japanese card game called hanafuda that dates to the latter part of the Shogunate. It uses a 48 card deck divided into 12 suits of 4 cards each. The cards all have unique names, and some of them are animals. (Nintendo’s original business was making and selling hanafuda decks.)

A hand which includes the boar (ino), the deer (shika), and the butterfly (chou) is a good one. It’s referred to as inoshikachou.

Apparently there are a lot of references to this in anime. The first Sakura Wars video game, which came out in 1996, had three villains named Ino, Shika and Chou. And the Dragonball manga, from the late 1980′s, had a villain named Inoshikachyou.