seiyuu3

I’m sure most of you will know about the recent Akiba stabbing incident, in which it was widly reported that the offender had announced his plans to commit the crime on the infamous Japanese BBS 2ch several weeks before the incident. There has been a number of half-copycats after the incident - “half” because people are posting announcements but without actually carrying it through/or was arrested before they could carry it through (thank goodness!). And now one of the latest incident took an interesting seiyuu twist.

According to the report, a 21 year old man had posted the following message on 2ch with his mobile phone:

「お前ら安心しろ。水樹奈々と水樹信者はダガーナイフと２ｔ（トン）トラックを使って、俺が代々木で皆殺しにしてやるからよ」

Roughly translating to “You guys don’t worry about it. I’m going to use a dagger and a 2t truck and kill Mizuki Nana and all her rabid fans at Yoyogi”.

Why Yoyogi? Well that’s because Mizuki Nana is going to hold her Live Fighter Concert at Yoyogi this weekend, and it’s anticipated that there will be at least 15,000 Mizuki Nana fans there.

The man confessed his crime. His reason? He just wanted to see the reaction.

I can’t think of anything meaningful to say, so I’ll leave it up to you guys.

Kikuchi Mika (Arika of Mai-Otome, Mokona of Tsubasa) wrote in her blog that her older brother had opened up a manga cafe in San Francisco named “Manga Cafe Mika” - which her brother and mother appropriately named it after Mika herself. Mika said that maybe she can have a signing event there sometime.

Who knows, maybe if you bug them enough be a nice loyal customer and ask they might bring her over.

Kitamura Eri first personal single coming up?

The Animate online store has an entry listing which essentially says “Kitamura Eri 1st Maxi-single” with a serial of LACM-4513, coming out on July 23rd. Since KitaEri has released numerous character singles for anime such as Seto no Hanayome and Kodomo no Jikan already I’d take it that this is going to be her first single under her very own name. I’m pumped for this release as I think KitaEri is another power seiyuu singer that has plenty of potential to make it big. However, LACM points to the single being released by Lantis, so there’s this looming bad vibe about this which I can’t shake off as well.

Either way, this is a good time to re-visit KitaEri’s Hyakka Seiran anisong covers to see why I’m excited:

Tamura Yukari’s Budoukan Live DVD set release confirmed

Anisong site Axive has reported that Yukarin’s historical live at Budoukan “Love♡Live 2008 *Chelsea Girl*” will see a DVD release on July 23rd (damn what’s with this day?!). A DVD release is expected and anticipated by many, but the real bit of news is that they are going to have a 5.1 soundtrack - a first for King Records’ seiyuu DVD releases I believe. Due to various circumstances I actually had to pass on this concert, and while there is no substitute for physically being there, at least a nicely mastered DVD with 5.1 soundtrack can capture part of the magic. Yukarin is taking one for the team here - as I’m sure depending on how this release is recieved that a 5.1 track for Nana’s Live Fighter concert for this year would be a given. So here’s hoping that the release will be good.

I have Minorin fanclub goods

Lazy man way to finish off this entry.

Mizuki Nana tops this week’s Oricon charts

Mizuki Nana’s concert DVD Live Formula sold some 16000+ copies in its first week, beating old-school famous Jpop duo CHAGE and ASAKA’s Live concert DVD released on the same week to claim first spot on the Oricon Music DVD Weekly, as well as ranking in 4th on the Overal DVD sales ranking. Note this is actually not the first time that Mizuki Nana had claimed top spot on the Oricon Music DVD ranking - her PV collection NANA CLIPS 3 was the first to do so. NANA CLIPS 3 was also the first ever seiyuu music DVD to rank first on the Oricon Music DVD Weekly charts. The result of Live Formula proves yet again that when it comes to seiyuu artists, Mizuki Nana is in a league of her own.

Following on, supporters of anisong singers and seiyuu artists has a lot to talk about in the past week when it comes to Oricon rankings. We first have Sakamoto Maaya/Kanno Yoko making a bit of history with the Macross Frontier opening theme song “Triangler” staying in the top 10s for 3 consecutive weeks, then you have May’n’s Sheryl songs ranking in 3rd on its debuting week. The power of Culture ™ is not to be under-estimated. Now when Nakajima Megumi releases her debuting CD as Ranaka Lee we will know for sure the branding power of Macross.

Kugimiya Rie’s appearance on NHK’s Anigiga

Now usually I have issues with NHK’s reporting (long story), but Kugimiya Rie’s recent TV appearance on Anigiga on the 14th May was actually a very nice piece of interview that is worth watching if you have even a remote passing interest in her. Her mentioning about how she was not much of an anime fan early in childhood due to her being raised in Kumamoto and how she utilise her interest in books to help her get into the voice acting was surprising, seeing how that there is an increase tendency for seiyuu to be huge anime fans as of recent. The other interesting thing was how her parents, wanting her to stay close to home, suggested her to be an announcer instead. I can’t picture this myself because her current vocal image is too deeply ingrained into my brain. For those who’s not fluent enough to watch the video raw, I still suggest you to watch the live adlib in the studio. The video file is now floating around on the Intertubes at the usual places.

I know it’s not a particularly flattering picture, but I like what she said there.

Chihara Minori loves Chinese dresses

Just an excuse for me to talk about Minorin, she posted a picture of herself in yet another Chinese dress (her fourth time). The dress (shown on the far right below) is a gift given to her by Inoue Marina. Let’s all give a big “Thank You” to Inoue Marina! Thank you Marina for indirectly giving us Minorin eye-candy!

Nobody beats her when it comes to “dressing up” though:

Can you tell who that is? (no clues in the tags, har har)

There’s been a fair amount of interest in this year’s Animelo Summer Live with people expressing desire to go to it. So we’re feeling a bit generous at seiyuu3 today and have decided to lend a hand in getting tickets for those of you actually making the trip over.

Now depending on the demand we may only be able to get tickets for a select few of you. So hope you’re one of the lucky ones!

If you want us to try to get tickets for you send us an email to seiyuu3 (at) gmail (dot) com and tell us what you want to do at Animelo. Also make sure you include the following:

Full name
Email address
Which day you want to go to
Date of arrival in Japan
Country you’re coming from

Now we’re doing this of our free time and energy and we don’t have a lot to spare. So if you’re not sure, don’t ask for one. Everyone else can express their futile desire in the comments. :P

That said, we’ll try our best to accomodate everyone.

Deculture!

I wasn’t planning to go revisit this topic; but as hashihime had left a recent comment and revived the topic, what was intended as a short reply turned into something of length, and I felt the need to address the issues openly again. I strongly recommend reading j1m0ne’s coverage again for the background - as she truly did a magnificent job of exposing the corporate incest involved in this award (which I couldn’t be bothered to write about myself for various reasons). Anyway, firstly here’s hashihime’s comments in regards to the Seiyuu Awards’ shameless merchandising post we put up earlier:

I’m not sure why this is such a big deal. Is it unusual for the entertainment industry to be interested in merchandising?

And in fact, the more I think about the awards, the less I think they were necessarily rigged. There is a spread across agencies large and small, unlike last year. And some of the winners you disagree with (read: Hirano Aya in all her manifestations) may easily have won by sheer public popularity, deserved or not.

Hashihime: No it’s not unusual for a company of an entertainment industry, driven by profit, to be interested in merchandising and we never claimed it to be. What is unusual is for an industry representative body that is not profit driven, formed for the purpose of giving out supposedly genuine awards to acknowledge the works of the seiyuu, to be interested in merchandising. When you put the two entirely different enterties under the same label of “entertainment industry”, of course you would come up with the exact question that you’ve asked, but I hope you see the difference and why the question you formed is a fallancy.

Also as j1m0ne has pointed it out in great detail already, I really don’t think there was any need to beat this dead horse. But I do want to address your comment here again because it shows an almost deliberate oversight of how the award currently works just so to believe that the result is entirely fair. For starters, it was made absolutely clear that the nominees were based upon public voting but then subjected to a panel of judges who decides on the winners. If the awards were won by sheer public popularity as you have suggested for certain winners, then why the need to have the judges in the first place? Wouldn’t a more strictly monitored voting system be sufficient to determine the winner? Why not just disclose the vote counts? I’m almost certain if they did that, it would actually put more legitimacy on the award than what they have going for them right now, and that the general seiyuu otakusphere wouldn’t have been in such an uproar about it - both domestically in Japan and overseas.

On the other hand there is the issue with the judges - what criteria the judges based their opinion on were not only kept entirely hidden, but in some cases were bent to questionable standards (eg Nagi’s qualification as supporting female character, or any of Kugimiya Rei’s mentioned roles in the official Seiyuu Award page for that matter being considered “supporting female roles”), so this begs the question of why the secrecy? And above all - why even the need to have the first round of public voting when in the end it’s the judges’ call on who wins - if not just to present the illusion of fairness and delude people to think that their vote somehow counts towards something to make the award seem open and fair?

Put simply there is absolutely no transparency in the system of this award. Once you start looking at the corporate links going on in the background it’s hard for people not to doubt the legitmacy of these awards - unless you really want to turn a blind eye to all the connections.

Well they finally announced it - one of the hottest anisong events Animelo Summer is on this year and the official site is now open. A preliminary list of artists attending are already on the site - with familiar names such as ALI Project, Kuribayashi Minami, Mizuki Nana, Chihara Minori, Ishikawa Chiaki, JAM Project, Momoi Halko, Hirano Aya, and two new players GRANRODEO and angela.

This year’s key word is “Challenge” - and with that they are definitely taking some new organizational challenges by not only upping the venue scale from Budoukan to Saitama Super Arena (the capacity depending on layout can be up to double the size), but also splitting the concert into two days, with what appears to be different artists performing on different days. I’m a bit torn on this move - as much as I like the prospects of two days worth of awesome live performances of anisongs, I don’t like them leaving me no choices but to go to both days to see all the artists I want to see.

On a related note, one of JAM Project’s long time female member Matsumoto Rika broke news shortly after the closing of JAM Project’s domestic concert tour that she will no longer take part in JAM Project and JAM Project related events. While hopeful fans were praying that it’s a late April’s Fool, but the profile picture of JAM Project at Animelo reflected this change. It’s a big blow to JAM Project, especially that JAM Project is supposedly doing a world tour this year (and what’s up with that anyway? Hardly any news is out regarding the schedule). Otakon still has her listed as guest, but I guess it’s up in the air.

According to her latest blog entry, made on the 4th, RieRie has changed to an agency named リトリート (Retreat) effective from April 1st. A quick search on the netz turns up surprising little information on an agency with such a name. Now not so long ago, 2ch had threads (also covered by Canned Dogs)about a large amount of seiyuu leaving their agencies, and the one which suffered the most lost was Tokyo Actor’s Consumer’s Cooperative Society (Haikyo). The rumor has it that seiyuu Morikawa Toshiyuki is starting a seiyuu agency himself and invited many in the industry to join his company, and that the company’s name would be named sometime in April. RieRie’s new agency Retreat could very well be the agency in the rumor.

Currently, a lot of the old time seiyuu agencies are actually spinoffs from talent agencies. It’s not too difficult to imagine that the two sectors has different requirements and work rules, thus it makes a lot of sense that some of the old veterans whom are slowly moving down from the front line are now doing their part in helping the industry.

The Seiyuu Award committee comes out and announces that they will be selling postcard sets of the winners at the Tokyo Anime Festival. Postcards FFS. At least last year’s short drama CDs between the winners are an actual display of acting skills. Now this, this is just blatant merchandising.