Interesting...

When I originally began work on Akazawa, the working title was "akaishirai" which is a bastardized combination of the word akai (red, bloody) and shirai (thread, string). And I was leaning towards "bloody" and "string"...string as in guts or pieces of meat. It was my intention at that time to use Akaishirai as a place name, though I also had only given place names a cursory glance.

Further into the development, I did some research on place names, their meanings, and general Japanese naming conventions. I came up with aka (red) and sawa (swamp). For the purpose of being a little different, and because you can also use zawa for swamp, I changed the name of the town that the story takes place in to Akazawa. A quick google search turned up no results. A map search of Japan also turned up no results. So unless there was some tiny crossroads somewhere called Akazawa, I felt I had a pretty unique identifier for the film.

While reading through this winter's anime season previews, I came across the horror anime "Another," which I am very much looking forward to. While I have an atmosphere and feeling I want to set with Akazawa that is pretty much nailed down, it helps to see how studios tell horror stories.

And then I noticed one of the characters in "Another" is named Izumi Akazawa.

And she has twintails like Kozue.

Wat.