Ayumu Kasuga

Ayumu Kasuga, also known as Osaka, is one of the main characters from the Azumanga Daioh anime and manga.

Ayumu is a transfer student from Osaka, Japan. Tomo Takino expects her to act like the stereotypical Osakan — loud, like a hillbilly, chose for her the nickname "Osaka", although her behavior could not be more different. The nickname sticks so well she is called 'Osaka' by teachers and even in the class roster, to the point that no one even remembers her real name (Yomi has a similar problem).

Appearance
Ayumu has a shoulder-length brown hair and has large brown eyes.

Personality
Ayumu reminisces how people in Osaka consider her "slow" and "spacey", at least compared to the average Osakan, but she lacks the energy or motivation to change.

Osaka often acts stuck in her own world. Although she seems slow and easily distracted, she merely has a mind that works quite differently from that of most people. Though she is often prone to daydreaming, absentmindedness and non-sequiturs, it also makes her unusually good at answering certain types of riddles. While some people assume that she lacks focus, the truth is that in quite a few cases, Osaka is really a little toofocused.

In contrast to most of her peers, Osaka always keeps a quiet, accessible mood. It's extremely rare to catch her in a fit of anger or losing control (as seen in Episode 25 of the anime, when she sports a maniac grin after finally learning how to break a pair of chopsticks evenly, and gets mad at Tomo for not doing it properly).

At the same time, Osaka has a habit of being able to point out obvious things nobody else seems to notice (such as the fact that none of her core group of friends has boyfriends or the fact that Kaorin had a crush on Sakaki) and has surprising levels of knowledge on unexpected topics such as marine biology and obscure kanji.

Trivia

 * Ayumu was awarded the 7th place in Newtype Magazine's top 100 heroines of 2002, the highest of all of Azumanga Daioh 's cast.
 * Despite the fact that she is the third tallest out of her friends, together with Kagura (since the two of them are the same height) in the canon version, she is shorter than both Kagura and Tomo in the anime, making her less than 154 cm of height and the second shortest after Chiyo. The reason the character designers made this change is unknown.
 * Osaka likes fun facts, word play and fruit juice.
 * She is allergic to pollen, like Yomi, and is known for sneezing in an unusually subtle way.
 * Osaka is shown to be bad at almost everything, ranging from schoolwork to P.E. But she is good at riddle-solving, and (at least in the anime) is a quite decent singer.
 * Osaka hates spicy food and carbonated drinks. According to Tomo, she has a short tongue, and can't hold her breath for more than a few seconds.
 * Different from other characters, Osaka's highlight is located on her lower left of each of her eyes instead of upper left.
 * She is obsessed with splitting chopsticks cleanly and made up a "magic charm" where you got good luck if you managed to do it. Chiyo ended up using the same method when praying for her friends to have good results on their college entrance exams.
 * Osaka was supposedly born in 1984.
 * Osaka is arguably the most popular Azumanga Daioh character due to her naivete and the antics they cause.
 * Many (especially TV Tropes) believe that Osaka is the very definition of a "cloudcuckoolander", using her as the trope image for the manga and anime section.
 * In the anime, "Get it together" (Shikkari) is treated as something of a catchphrase for Osaka, but in the manga she actually only says it once and without repeating it.