MI'TAKA:
MI (Kanji): "3, three"
TAKA (Kanji): "hawk, falcon"
"three hawks", a city in Tokyo where relatively high class people live SHUN:
SHUN (Kanji): "wink, twinkling (of stars), flicker (of light)"
A tennis coach with shining teeth (TM), he is notorious for being a ``woman
killer''. He had some bad memories about dogs when he was little, so he has
a very strong fear of dogs. He met Kyoko when she joined the tennis club
that he worked for. He and Godai recognized each other as rivals very
quickly. He wooed Kyoko quite boldly, but ironically that approach actually
strengthened Kyoko's feelings towards Godai in most cases. His uncle
arranged an ``omiai'' between Shun and Asuna, but he reacted quite badly when Asuna introduced those that she considered her brothers and sisters: dogs. Although he wanted to turn down the match, his uncle proceeded with the arrangements anyway, so he tried one final option, introducing Kyoko to his parents. That night, when Shun took Kyoko to a drive-in, she finally turned down his approach. Mitaka finally realized that to Kyoko, his existence did not hold as much significance as Godai's. A few days later when Godai challenged him to a duel to settle their scores, he openly showed jealousy to Godai and drank rather heavily. Afterwards, Asuna found him near his door of his apartment. When she tried to carry him inside, he kissed her and fell asleep, not remembering a thing the next morning. He thought he had done unspeakable things with her. Conversation with her at the Kujou family cottage reinforced the misconception because both of them talked in vague expressions. When Asuna started to spread the news of pregnancy, he gave up and decided to marry her. Afterwards, he found out that it was her dog Salad who had become pregnant --- but he was partially responsible anyway because McKenroe was the father. By the time the Godai's have their first child at the end of the series, Shun and Asuna Mitaka have becomeproud parents of twin girls, one of whom looks like Shun and the other like Asuna. The third one is doing well inside Asuna.
McKenroe is the dog Mitaka got to conquer his canine-phobia. The name is
taken from the famous John ``You-Know-Who''. Mitaka tried to
self-hypnotize himself: ``Dogs are cute... Dogs are cute... Come
here McKenroe...'' When he started doing this, he passed out when the
dog friskily jumped onto his lap. After a while, the pet started to look
like his master: that is, he too started to have shiny teeth. Asuna's
dog also got the same shiny teeth as Mitaka's had. When Asuna's dog
had puppies, she named them Salt, Pepper and Ginger.
Note on japan character voice: though in the late 70's Akira Kanda did numerous heroes of the ``super-robot'' genre. One of more famous characters he has done was Roy Focker in Super Dimension Fortress: Macross.
Recently he has been doing paranormal characters like Ryo Saeba (City Hunter), Shoutaro Mendo (Urusei Yatsura), Kenshiro (Fist of Northstar), and the worst being Ape (Maps). I wish he had done the voice of Tatewaki Kunou in ``Ranma 1/2'' since he is a hypered-up version of Mitaka.
