seiyuu3

Practically everyone and their PCs knows about Nana-chan’s involvement as Madobe Nanami with Windows 7, but she’s not the only one taking part in the launch of the OS. Here are some more Windows 7 launch events that involves seiyuu.

DOSPARA gets Furuya Touru (Amuro Ray) for their Wednesday night launch party. This is not the first time that Furuya had done PC related event as he had attended numerous Intel CPU launch parties in Akiba before. Apparently he is a PC builder himself too and even writes his own little programs, truely living up to his Amuro persona.

Softmap gets 3 seiyuu for their launch event on Thursday morning (weird time to have a launch event since its not a holiday, but I guess they are expecting NEETs): Imai Asami, Shiraishi Minoru and Yanase Natsumi. AFAIK Mingosu is a gamer but not a tech head, Minoru probably knows a bit about PCs but he’ll just wing the rest like he usually does, and I’ve got nothing personality wise on Yanase Natsumi. Very weird combination to say the least.

I wonder if they give out signed copies at these events. Signitures from any one of these guys would be infinitely better (to us seiyuu otas) than the Steve Ballmer signed copies they are giving away elsewhere.

If you have only gotten into either seiyuu and/or anime fandom in the last few years, then the name of Tange Sakura wouldn’t mean much to you. But to some of us old farts veterans that had been around during the anime/seiyuu boom periods in the late 90s/early 2000s with shitty 28.8k dial-up internet, if I just say “hoe?” I’m sure all the old farts veterans will remember those good old days(TM).

For the others who wants a brief history, you can visit here (the old shitty page I wrote eons ago), but for the tl;dr, Tange Sakura was one of the great seiyuu that defined the 90s seiyuu idol boom. She stopped working as a seiyuu just when she reached her peak in 2000 which left many of her fans, me included, with unmeasurable sadness (FWIW, one of the rumors back then said that her retirement had to do with stalkers, some things never change, heh).

So why bring this up now? Because Tange Sakura recently came out of retirement, and with the new otaku craze date-sim game Love Plus by Konami (not a misnomer this time, Love Plus is a date-sim game to the very definition of the term and not the bastardised English usage) she came back with a Big Bang. She is now also hosting a radio program on Cho! A&G call “Tange Sakura no RADIO A.La.Mode”. While sadly this is not streamed officially on the tubes, you can find copies of it around. So listening to this program today I’m fully reminded of how much we seiyuu-otas LOVED her ultra-moe voice back then.

It’s not just her voice, which is cute, delicate and soothing without being piercing ultra-high pitched like some other seiyuu, but her real killer technique is in those little non-word sounds like “kya” and “eee” she makes, during the drama part the usage of those in her acting is just pure MOE. But this should be expect, as Tange Sakura is the person that personified the first “official” MOE character, Kinomoto Sakura from Card Captor Sakura. Oh, and Tange Sakura is 36 this year. Yes, for real, her voice is still that moe at this age.

I wish I had access to my stash of Tange Sakura CDs which I bought during those years because I have a serious itch to re-live those times again, too bad they are a few thousand ks away.

So basically it was:
1) Her voice made it difficult for her to find proper work because at the interviews the interviewers would think she is screwing around. She was turned down by more than 50 companies.
2) Even when she landed her job, she can’t work much as an OL because when she answer phone calls and… well you can imagine the rest
3) Her older sister suggested that she should be a seiyuu, she thought that as a seiyuu that she would not be troubled by her looks either (she’s 146cm tall and combined with her voice she is being constantly mistaken for a high schooler or even a middle schooler), so she tried out and with her voice she hit it big straight away.

いいハナシだね (it’s a beautiful story)

Saw it on the Nicodouga live stream. The seiyuu for the 3 new characters are:

Hidaka Ai: Tomatsu Haruka
Mizutani Eri: Hanazawa Kana
Akizuki Ryo: Sanpei Yuuko

The addition of Toma-chan and Kana-chan is a bit from the left field, since the im@s franchise haven’t been known to get established seiyuu, let alone the freshest and hottest idol seiyuu currently around (Kugimiya Rie was grabbed before her big break FWIW). Potentially this could be a negative thing, as these hot idols will be much harder to book for events and such (refer to Kugyu), so I’m thinking the direction of the DS game and its new characters might be slightly different than the current batch of idols we have so far. Also the singing skills of the seiyuu are a little on the average side, but either way I’ll still be looking forward to Toma-chan and Kana-chan covering the famous im@s songs such as Shiny Smile and Go My Way! because to me one of the most fascinating aspect of the im@s franchise is listening to the seiyuu with different voice qualities and abilities singing the same songs.

Both Toma-chan and Kana-chan made an appearance at the concert today and performed the theme song for the game “Hello!”. Follow the link below if you have a Nico account.

EDIT: For those without Nico accounts:

Official PoRk sauce.

I know that a lot of Japanese guests and companies planned attendance for overseas anime and game cons/events had been heavily affected by the swine flu, and understandably fans aren’t happy. Just thought that I’ll throw in a balancer so that people can know that the Japanese domestic fans are getting hit too (well they should, considering that Japan’s confirmed cases of swine flu is so high and still going up by the day).

FWIW, the Fukuoka session is still a go, while the Tokyo session is under review.

The channel is here and viewing the videos doesn’t require registration. Though if you want to become a member of the channel’s community (and thus be able to comment on the videos of the channel) you will need to have a NicoDouga account.

Also Asapon’s first cover of a Kagamine Rin song イタズラムスメ (Itazuramusume, original can be heard here) will be made available on the iTunes Music Store (hopefully *not* limited to the Japan store) on May 1st.

The award ceremony is suppose to be this Saturday, but naturally all the magazines already knew who the winners are so they can do their interviews to make it in time for publications. So while surfing image boards a small picture of the upcoming Voice Newtype came up and shows us that their winner cover special has these people:

So that almost certainly means Kamiya Hiroshi and Kugimiya Rie won best actor/actress respectively. I would think that Kamiya Hiroshi got it for Zetsubou Sensei, but on the other hand I have no idea what the Kugyu would have gotten it for.

The smaller words below also shows names such as Sugita Tomokazu (looks like his picture in the second from left too), Tomatsu Haruka, Nakajima Megumi and Fukuyama Jun. Third picture from the left looks like Endo Aya to me (the kanji just above the picture seems to read as her name too). I think I can make out Sawashiro Miyuki above Sugita’s photo as well.

Speculations and flames on what roles they’ve won it for welcome. ;)

Animelo 2009 RE:Bridge

I missed the livecast, but thanks to everyone’s live-spamming of this site (lol), I got to know the initial line-up for Animelo 2009 without even having to check the official site! User-generated content FTW? Anyway, with them going to the lengths of setting up an English site, I guess keeping up with this year’s line-up will be much simplier. Now just a summary of what artist we have thus far:

22nd August: Ayane, Ishikawa Chiaki, ELISA, JAM Project, Chihara Minori
23rd August: Sakakibara Yui, Savage Genius, Hirano Aya, Mizuki Nana, Yonekura Chihiro

It seems to me that Saturday currently lacks the 萌え idol seiyuu singers while Sunday is lacking the 燃え GAR/male singers. So I’m predicting that they will probably do something about that to balance the two days up in the upcoming annoucements. With Nana-chan and Hirano Aya both on Sunday (FWIW, they have gone head-to-head on the same day before when Aya appeared as special guest in 2007, though I guess most people had sealed that memory away due to that horrendous punk version of Bouken Desho Desho) it’s going to be a sell out for all the rabid fanboys and it would probably be just short of a riot when it comes to them fighting over tickets. If it is up to me I would think that they would do a temporary reunion of Yamato Nadeshiko (Yukarin and Hoc-chan) on Saturday to get the fanboys to step and craw over each others’ smelly bodies for Saturday’s session too. For GAR singers, well, I’m not that knowledgible in those, but I wouldn’t mind if they bring back GRANRODEO or something along that line. Oh and if m.o.v.e makes another appearance, please sing something else besides Gamble Rumble. You have an entire catalog of good Initial D theme songs, use them!

First iDOLM@STER Concert Tour

On other concert news, the iM@S girls are going to have their first ever concert tour in 4 major cities in May. The cities they are visiting are in the order of Nagoya, Osaka, Fukuoka and final stop at Tokyo. Appearance of the seiyuu are all over the place though from the initial announcements – like Takahashi Chiaki “Chiaking” only appearing at the Tokyo session and Shimoda Asami “Asapon” at Fukuoka only, plus the usual absence of Ochiai Yurika “Yurishii” and Kugimiya Rie “Kugyuu~”. Unless they change the line up it just means that it would be impossible to see to all the performances in one session. Someone made a reference guide for the line-up and I’ve just PS the English bits myself. While Tokyo looks the most delicious (as expected, and competition for tickets will be fierce), the lack of Asapon is going to be a real let down for me.

Nana-chan New Album on 20th May

So we now have a date, apparently it will contain 15 tracks, and the first press comes with a DVD of the secret event for Trickster which had Nana roping in a bunch of her other seiyuu friends such as Sugita Tomokazu, Suzumura Kenichi, Sawashiro Miyuki, and Kuwatani Natsuko and TEH Wakamoto (even though only as narration) did a play. I wonder if the epicness of the DVD will boost the sales even more by getting a few more sales from the fans of the other seiyuu?

Following closely to her getting number one spot on the Oricon Daily Singles chart with Shinai, Nana-chan now has another record to add to her list of musical achievements – this time for her Blu-ray disk set of the Live Fighter concert　”Live Fighter Blue X Red Side” being the first ever music related Blu-ray disk to have sold more than 10,000 copies in Japan (source).

While this is good news for Nana-chan and her fans, I think this says a lot more about the adaptation rate of Blu-ray in the general population and the condition of the music industry rather than the success of Nana-chan. If no other artists had sold more than 10,000 copies of their concerts or music clip Blu-rays up till now, if I was to be working for someone like SME or Avex I won’t be sleeping well at night that’s for sure.

Arguably one of the most camera-friendly seiyuu, RieRie is finally releasing her own photo album. Apparently she announced it on a radio show yesterday, which is double confirmed in her latest blog post.

No title as of yet (she’s considering asking listeners for ideas) and other information such as release date hasn’t surfaced, but I’ll keep an eye on this one.

I wonder what kind of photo album can we expect? Will it be full of photos of her in cosplay?