Japanese Girl Draws Cartoons to Show Support for COVID-19 Fight

A Japanese girl has recently drawn great attention on social media with her Chineselanguage cartoons on preventing COVID-19 infections.

The cartoons featured a giant panda in a nurse’s hat imparting epidemic prevention knowledge. With her lively painting style, easyto-understand explanations, and best wishes for people in difficult times, the Japanese girl “Xiang Xiang” has gained a large number of fans in China, with many leaving her messages saying things like “Thank you, beautiful Japanese girl” and “The epidemic does not know national boundaries, and we will work together.”

“Please take good care of yourselves and come back safely!” said the Japanese girl, whose real name is Iwasaki Haruka, in a video recorded at her home in Yokohama, Kanagawa prefecture.

She was expressing her best wishes for her former colleagues in the China-japan Friendship Hospital of Beijing and prayed for the safety of all the medical staff in the front line of fighting

COVID-19 in China’s

Wuhan.

In the summer of

2018, she was sent to

Beijing by the Japan

Overseas Cooperation Volunteers and worked as a volunteer nurse in China-japan Friendship Hospital.

Her Chinese colleagues affectionately referred to her as “Xiang Xiang” because her name has the same Chinese character as the popular panda cub Xiang Xiang born at Ueno Zoo in Tokyo. The cartoon “Xiang Xiang Diary” features a panda as the protagonist and recorded the daily work with her colleagues.

Xiang Xiang’s volunteer service at the hospital was not supposed to end until July this year, but she was forced to return to Japan on January 29 due to the COVID-19 outbreak. When she learned that her colleagues went to Wuhan in the fifth medical aid team, she hand-painted the logo of the national emergency medical aid team, where the hospital belongs, and used it as her Wechat avatar, also adding “Keep fighting, China-japan Friendship Hospital” to show support for her former colleagues.