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Source.

Yeah you read that right, that’s some serious crazy shit that Taiwanese otakus are doing. The Kugyuu is going to be guest at the Taipei International Book Exhibition 2010 and will be doing some signing provide you buy some Shana goods, limited to the first 89 customers, from one of the venders which goes on sale on the morning of the 27th. However not just one or two, but up to twenty crazy otakus decides that it’s a good idea to start lining up on the 3rd – 25 days before the sales date, and predictably they made it to the news.

Just when you think fanboy craziness can’t get any crazier, someone is out there to prove you wrong.

So after the big/huge/gigantic news of Nana-chan’s performance on Kouhaku, you have to admit that everything else is not that news worthy, and even downright boring. So after turning my nose up at the other pieces for a few weeks, here are some things which are finally worth posting.

Mizuki Nana stars as lead in new Pretty Cure
Well had to begin with Nana-chan now that she’s on after burner towards mainstream stardom and recognition. As all Nanatards will know, Nana-chan has the tendency to star in either shitty throw away side characters of good shows, or good characters in shitty throw away shows, with very little exceptions. So now that she finally gets to be the heroine of the biggest anime franchise in Japan watched by little girls AND lolicons “big adult friends” alike for a full year, it’s time to celebrate that she’s going to actually live up to the voice acting part of her seiyuu career (probably). Oh, and Nanoha fanboys should be happy to see that Nana-chan gets to play more ass-kicking, brutal fist-fighting magical girls that would make most modern day shounen heros look like pussies.

Mizuki Nana sings for new Metal Gear Solid game
Just can’t stop the big news once you’ve gone to ultra-celebrity status can you? As revealed in her blog, Nana-chan just recorded an insert song titled “恋の抑止力” (Koi no Yokushiryoku, Love’s Deterrance) for the latest Metal Gear game. Kojima Hideo is a pretty big seiyuu fan (some may say even an otaku?), so it’s not too surprising that he would create an opportunity for Nana-chan to show off her vocals in his game. Perhaps he even went out of his way to make this happen to satisfy his inner seiyuu-ota, who knows. Now whether the English version of the game would have this song though is a different story, but I would recommend people to play the J-dub anyway as I’ve found the franchise had always felt too Japanese in its presentation style and writing thus fairly incompatible with an English track (it’s like dubbing a Kung-fu movie you know? no matter how good you do it, it just doesn’t work), Nana-chan being in there or not.

Tomatsu Haruka’s new photo book sample photos
The title is “Pi Touch! High Touch!” (sorry for the lame Idolmaster breast-touching event joke), and as promised, there’s the bikini shot! They seem to have toned down her approachable cutesy girl-next-door image for something a little more young adult. Want or Do Not Want? That’s for you to decide.

Takahashi Chiaki to release photo book and DVD
As she wrote in her blog here, while this is not anything new and hardly news worthy, I liked how she gave her motivation for doing these things in a recent Famitsu interview (thanks for pointing it out Dom! Would’ve been too lazy to read it otherwise) – “Because those celebrities and gravue idols are coming here [into the voice acting world], so I’d thought I’ll go over there too.” – a strange yet great display of her pride in voice acting in doing what is, as she sees it, as essentially the same thing (rookies light-heartingly entering into another profression’s world). The full interview is fairly interesting too, like how when she told her parents she was going to become a seiyuu instead of going to university, her father kicked her out of the house hoping she would be deterred in her quest and come back to her senses, but he still gave her a million yen anyway as living expense before doing so.

IM@S Christmas Live
Looks AWSME, all those bitching about the commercialisation of Christmas can die in imaginary hell fire because it gave us Santa Girl costumes (probably the only thing worth celebrating on Christmas for an atheist like me, LOL). Now when are those Blu-ray/DVDs coming out, pretty please?

Seems that Microsoft Japan’s aim to capture the otaku crowd has no limits. This time they are running a campaign for their search engine Bing, where if you use the search engine from their special campaign site, a little meter on the page fills up. When the meter reaches a certain stage by the deadline of the campaign, they will release digital items (wallpapers, sound themes) for their 5 new companion mascots. The mascots are voiced by Nakamura Eriko (Amami Haruka of im@s), Matayoshi Ai (some character from Saki), Takita Juri (Otonashi Kotori of im@s, and recently main heroine Satsuki Yuu of Tokimemo 4), Imai Asami (Kisaragi Chihaya of im@s), and Fujita Saki (Hatsune Miku) – quite a nice line-up of some cult favs here.

The meter is currently close to approaching 25% already despite the campaign only started on the 18th this month, and the deadline is January 18th 2010. Bing’s actually a fairly decent search engine (I especially like Bing’s image search, which IMO is better than google’s, and the seamless scrolling is worth trying), so you might as well go and give it a run if you haven’t already, for those who has already tried and uses Bing, go and help the cause to get more moe moe mascots and seiyuu sound themes on Windows.

This time in the form of Nana-chan appearing as guest on NHK’s mid-day program “Studio Park kara Konnichiwa“. It’s a pretty nice recap on Nana-chan’s life, including some bits before her seiyuu career, all conducted without all the Akiba/otaku reference unlike her earlier TV appearances, and they actually treat her like a, well, respectable singer/performer/celebrity. See how differently you get treated once you received the NHK seal of approval?

The letter from mum thing at the end is a nice touch, but a very much over-used and calculated Japanese entertainment trick to get the viewers more into the celebrity in question. Oh well, that’s the entertainment biz for you.

Long leg idol seiyuu Tomatsu Haruka announced in her blog a few days ago that she will be releasing her second photo album as well as her first solo album Feburary next year. She also mentioned that this time there will be swimsuit shots (!). The sound you just heard is a combination of a thousand fanboys (and fangirls) falling to the ground due to blood lost from picturing her in a swimsuit while the album weeps quietly in the dark corner for being ignored.

The im@s girls and Shimoda Asami made the cut to this years Animelo Blu-ray and DVD, but somehow Shoko-tan didn’t make the cut (nobody cares though, right?) yet GACKT did. Proving yet again that the Elevens suck at negotiating rights. The days till they release a full concert is nowhere in sight.

Kawakami Tomoko apparently had a role in the second season of DARKER THAN BLACK, prompting fans to speculate that she came out of hiatus. She went into hiatus due to health problems around July/August of 2008.

Sauce.

I’m really feeling her returning to the seiyuu circle in full force with this announcement. The song choice is awesome. 今はまだ遠いラブソング (Ima ha mada tooi Love Song) was amongst the first few songs that got me hooked on Tange Sakura. Throw in a couple of CCS covers (Catch You Catch Me and Platinum) plus the theme song “You’re my destiny” to the new radio program (which is pure moe crack from just that little bit they insert at the beginning of the radio show) and this already looks to be a solid album. Looking forward to hear how she would go back to cover her earlier songs as well after she spent a decent amount of time in the last few years just singing.

Music news site natalie reports that the theme song for the upcoming Haruhi movie – “The Disappearance of Suzumiya Haruhi” – will be sung by Chihara Minori. This wouldn’t be a surprise to anyone whom is familiar with the story of the novel, but without getting into spoilers for those not in the known, this particular story arc is heavily focused on Nagato, with Haruhi pretty much swept into the background and only making very sparse appearances, as such the movie theme song being sung by Nagato’s seiyuu is the only natural choice.

While the second season (or maybe season 1.5?) of Haruhi received mixed responses and arguably put a large turd on the once shinny brand, “Disappearance” has a very tight storyline as well as full of Nagato-moe that should have the potential to bring the brand back to where it once was. Minorin would be in a very good position to show off both acting and singing skills in the movie.

Watch it before it is gone.

Yukarin’s costume looks a bit Santa-ish, just in time for the festive season?

A new seiyuu agency named Early Wing just popped up in the last few days and had snagged away Kitamura Eri and Imai Asami from their previous agency Kaleidoscope. There’s also one more seiyuu Abe Reiko signed with this agency but she’s relatively unknown compared with OtaEri and Mingosu. These 3 are the only seiyuu thus far announced to be belonging to this agency. They have an official blog, which would probably be spammed by OtaEri the most judging from her posting habits from the past when she was blogging on the Kaleidoscope blog, which unfortunately had purged all her posts already it seems.

Not much info on the agency right now, but seems to be a fairly low-key operation. Company’s address is all the way out in Chiba-ken which is kind of unusual as traditionally the companies are located inside Tokyo city, suggesting that the company might be really small on a tight budget. Either way hopefully this would mean a better future for OtaEri and Mingosu, especially for their music side of things.

EDIT: I just notice that they misspelt actors as acters in their logo. Way to go with the vote for confidence!

Stole the pics from their page, but they are are too bright. I know making it bright hides the less-than-perfection face of almost anyone and anything, but the aim is not to blind someone.

Music Japan’s latest Kouhaku special has a special segment on Nana-chan before, during and after she recieved news of her appearance on Kouhaku.

I LOL’d at the bit where Misshi was putting on a “gotta talk serious biz” game face which totally freaked Nana-chan out like a school kid trying to figure out why she was being called into the principal’s office. Then Misshi broke the news and the display of emotion where she nearly cried (d’awwww). The final scene of Nana-chan calling her mum to tell her the news is both heart-warming and a little sad at the same time. Heart-warming for all the obvious reasons, sad because as someone commented before, her father is no longer in this world to be able to hear the news. Though Nana-chan mentioned that her mother said she will bring her father’s photo to the show seems to at least suggest that the family has moved on ok.