Mito Yuna are friends, but not just friends. That's what "Mitomodachi" is all about.

Model/Talent　Mito Yuna

■ Profile
She is a high school student model/talent who has appeared in three seasons of AbemaTV's hugely popular romance reality show, "Kyou, Suki ni Narimashita.", which features high school students, and has become a hot topic. Her image color is green, and her fan mark is the "🟢" (🟢), so high school students all over the country are flocking to take photos with their hands in a circle, which they call the "Mito Yuna pose."
She is a life-sized high school girl who has gained a lot of sympathy from the teen generation and is currently attracting a lot of attention!

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[2023 Trend Prediction Ranking] We ranked 1st in the talent category and 3rd in the TikToker category!
https://prtimes.jp/main/html/rd/p/000000080.000020107.html

Mito Yuna has always been interested in the entertainment industry, and made her big break with ABEMA's "Kyou, Suki ni Narimashita." In the future, she hopes to not only post on social media, but also take on further acting challenges and spread ideas that are difficult to grasp, such as the SDGs, to a wider audience. We spoke to her about her connections with fans and her future prospects.

When I was a child, my father would tell me, "Yuna, you'll be a model in the future," and I loved reading magazines, so I dreamed of a career in showbiz. I thought about auditioning, but I gave up because I wasn't tall enough. Then, in the spring of my first year of junior high school, I was scouted by my current agency on Takeshita Street. I had been taking lessons since I was in junior high, but my full-fledged debut in showbiz began with my appearance on "Kyou, Suki ni Narimashita" during high school. Before appearing on the show, I had around 800 followers, but after appearing on it, I had 250,000 (laughs). Even as my follower count increases, I want to continue to cherish the presence of my fans by increasing my interactions with them.

■ Connection with fans is more important than anything else

I'm amazed at the number of people who have created accounts just for me, and fans who buy multiple copies of magazines even though I only have one page in them. I'm extremely grateful to my fans, and they're important to me. I call my fans "friends," and I'm aiming for a new kind of friendship. I can't make plans to hang out or reply to DMs, but they'll talk about trivial things like "I had a fight with a friend" or "My boyfriend dumped me."
　Speaking of my broadcasting activities, acting videos are popular on TikTok, so I'd like to focus more on that. However, K-pop dances have been popular recently, but they're difficult to dance to, and by the time I learn the dance, the next song is already popular, so it's quite difficult (laughs). I also think it's hard to see on Instagram if people are scattered left and right, so I try to post with the angle of view in mind, such as leaving space above, below, left, and right. I also post videos about my daily life, including recent events, on YouTube. For example, I often post things like, "I lost my Air Pods!", which is something I'd normally tell a friend.

■In the future, I would like to break down and spread information about acting and difficult terminology.

I still don't have much experience in acting, so I'd like to gain more from now on. It may be because I don't have much experience, but I think that acting and other video work is much harder than modeling. For example, I'm from Kanagawa Prefecture, and I don't think my intonation is wrong, but I've often been told about my intonation, so it's difficult not to act too rigidly according to the advice. Maybe it's just me though (laughs).
　Recently, I've been watching more dramas in an effort to improve my acting skills. However, watching dramas for work becomes less fun, so I try to watch things I like. From my previous experience working on a social media drama, I've come to realize how much attention is paid to even one or two seconds of footage. The dramas I worked on weren't particularly long, but they were still very difficult, so I look at longer dramas from a different perspective, wondering things like, "How long does it take?" and "What kind of attention is paid to even this one second?" In addition to dramas, I'm also conscious of posting acting-related TikToks. I believe that if I look at it from a different perspective, this can also be practice to improve my acting skills (laughs).
Although it may be difficult to achieve in the future, I would like to appear in a romance drama that many people of my generation would watch, and also appear in the Tokyo Girls Collection, which I have never appeared in before.
I'm also interested in conveying to many people terms like SDGs that are often difficult to understand, even if you've heard of them but researched them yourself. Even if you're curious and look up "What are the SDGs?", you'll find a string of difficult terms and in the end you won't understand what they're saying. I also think that what I don't understand is often something that people younger than me can't understand either. Just like my mother explained it to me in an easy-to-understand way when I asked her, "What does this mean?", I would like to understand these difficult terms for others and convey them to many people in my own words.

■Message to university students (same generation)

First of all, I want people to try out all sorts of experiences. I was fortunate to have been able to gain a lot of experience rather than sticking to one thing for a long time. Through those experiences, I gradually began to see what I wanted to do, so I would recommend trying out all sorts of experiences first.

Interviewed by Student Newspaper Online on May 3, 2022 by Hayato Tane, a fourth-year student at Chuo Gakuin University