I am wondering if someone can shed light on this tweet from Japan?


A friend of mine recently translated a Japanese article from Japan's October
issue of An An magazine and sent her a tweet in English telling her that it
was completed. The author replied with the following tweet: (^з^)-☆ ば

I have only been studying Japanese online for less than a year, and can't make
any sense of her response. When I look it up in the Japanese to English
dictionary, it refers to location, which doesn't make sense.

Can anyone help?




Apparently `ば` is Yoshimoto Banana's signature on Twitter (`ば` is for `ばなな`).
A couple of other examples of her tweets:

> ψ(｀∇´)ψ ば
>
> ですね^ ^ ば

Sometimes members of her staff will write tweets using her account and sign
them `スタッフ` so you can tell that Yoshimoto Banana herself didn't write them.

* * *

**EDIT:** I wrote this up quickly last night, but I have this nagging feeling
that I need to give credit where it's due: my wife is a huge Yoshimoto Banana
fan and as soon as she saw that tweet and "an an magazine" (which she insists
should be all lowercase, by the way) she said "Oh, that's Yoshimoto Banana."

