Kashimashi - Production

Production

When it was decided that Kashimashi: Girl Meets Girl would begin serialization in MediaWorks' manga magazine Dengeki Daioh, Satoru Akahori wondered what kind of a message he could send to the readers, and eventually decided he wanted to write a steady message of "true love". Akahori noted that up to the creation of Kashimashi, the works that he created were far apart from the concept of true love, and much of his previous work involved a lot of ecchi content which Akahori was attempting to avoid in Kashimashi. He wondered if the story would be interesting, and if he could surprise normal readers and fans of his previous works, if he wrote a true love story without much ecchi or fan service.

When thinking on how to write about true love, Akahori considered laughingly that in normal relationships between boys and girls, it eventually tends towards having sex. In order to avoid this, he chose to have a cast of female main characters, but he felt that audiences have experienced this before and that it thus would not be enough. This is when he thought up the idea of changing the main character from a boy to a girl. Akahori knew this would be a problem, since normally changing a person's gender would cause complications, one of them being that the now-female character would invariably want to return to being male. He knew that there were a few problems that could not be avoided, but he wanted to remove the desire to turn back into a male. For this reason, Akahori devised that the character would not want to turn back into a male if there was the impact of the entire world already having accepted the fact that his gender had changed. To do this, Akahori decided to have the alien who crashed into the character to not only revive the character as a female, but to broadcast this over the entire world, which is what happens at the beginning of Kashimashi. Afterwards, Akahori felt it necessary to expand on the alien's role in the story. At this point in the development process, Akahori felt he could now begin writing the story.

The title Kashimashi loosely translates as "noisy, boisterous, or clamorous" and is derived from the Japanese phrase, "When three women gather, it is noisy" (女三人寄れば姦しい, Onna sannin yoreba kashimashii?). The main title was originally romanized as Kasimasi in accordance with Kunrei-shiki romanization, but this was later changed in the English adaptations to Kashimashi in accordance with Hepburn romanization.