seiyuu3

Everyone into computers are familiar with the all-bunsiness-and-no-nonsense image of Lenovo, well that image is no more, at least in Japan.

Lenovo Japan is holding a 2 day event in Ikebukuro this weekend to promote their new PCs equiped with Windows 7, and they have invited seiyuu Minaguchi Yuuko, most famous for her role in YAWARA! in Japan for the old generation, while younger Japanaese fans might be more familiar with her role in the otaku cult game Love Plus. Overseas fans living in the Intertubes might know her as Akiko in Kanon and Fuuko’s sister Kyoko in Clannad.

Speaking of which what I find interesting is that only the overseas computer companies does these sorts of seiyuu events (Microsoft, Lenovo, Microsoft even did a tie-in with Ultraman!) yet I haven’t seen the domestic companies such as Sony, Toshiba and Fujitsu do them. I know Fujitsu has KimuTaku (Kimura Takuya) from SMAP as their spokes person for a while now, which is loads more famous than just about everyone else you can get with money in Japan, and Toshiba has pretty boy band NEWS member Yamashita Tomohisa for their notebooks. My theory is that the the costumer base for the foreign companies are probably more niche and made up of hardcore geeks which overlaps squarely with the otaku base and taste, whereas the domestic players goes for the general consumers.

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After Nana-fying your OS, might as well Nana-fy your blog too, if only for 60 days (maybe they leave it up afterwards?).

For those unfamiliar, Kouhaku is NHK’s annual New Year’s eve music program. NHK is Japan’s biggest national broadcaster, and Kouhaku is traditionally an annual event for the typical Japanese folks, this is because unlike Westeners, the Japanese culturally spends New Year’s eve with their family at home and they then go to the shrine to pray etc.

Kouhaku used to have insane viewer ratings, the highest ever was some 80% in the Kanto area, so being on Kouhaku was a big deal for singers and like conducting a concert at Budoukan, is a holy grail for artists because that means you have proven yourself to be well known enough to qualify appearing on the show. However Kouhaku in the recent years had seen its ratings on the decline (still in the 40%, so still nothing to scoff at, more so if you know that most shows in Japan don’t get more than a double digit rating), a lot of the higher-ups were thinking that it is due to the younger generation abandoning TV watching in general so NHK had been pretty active in the last few years in trying to appeal more to the younger generation and otakus, such as the inclusion of some supposedly “Akiba idols” in 2007/8. This year, NHK had created a small team of “Digital Promoters” aiming to promote the program on the interwebs, and the members are celebrities Sekine Mari, Terry Itou, and our very own Mizuki Nana.

All 3 personalities will work together to promote the show via the show’s homepage on the web and mobile networks, but Nana-chan gets her own very special roles. Here’s what she would be doing:
1) Starting from November 1, a countdown clock blog part will be made available that features 60 (that’s right that’s a six-zero) pictures of Nana-chan. There will be voices too, everyday!
2) She would also be hosting a blog titled “Mizuki Nana – Kouhaku Blog” that will provide up to date information on the show

More official information can be found here.

In other words, Nana-chan is actually the biggest focus out of the three in the team, which is quite something. If nothing this would still greatly boost the exposure Nana-chan will get in the mainstream. And true enough nearly all major news sites had been using her name in the headlines. Heck you can see it in the PR event that she’s the one standing in the centre spot.

With how much Nana-chan had been doing for NHK this year (Music Japan narrator and appearance, now official Digital PR person for Kouhaku), all that’s left is that last annoucement of Nana-chan actually BE on Kouhaku. All of it looks to be very close to becoming a reality, and when that happens that would be the day all we Nanatards Nana-chan fans can celebrate and declare her to be the indisputable Queen of Seiyuu Artists.

Link is safe for work, sort of?

I can’t think of a post title that would read, er, “safer”? Anyway I should’ve posted this much earlier when it came up here but there was no link to the ordering site (or read: I’m lazy). The picture really speaks for itself. And LOL King is the only one where they don’t mention the year of birth.

Linky.

Doesn’t look like they were giving out any signs afterall, but the first buyer got to take a photo with the 3 seiyuu.

And holy sh*t what happened to Minoru? He used to be sort of kimo-kakkoi but it looks like he gained 50 pounds and had joined the ranks of kimo-otas. Maybe it was to blend into the crowd or something.

Mingosu still looks nice though.

Omake:

Nana signed Nanami
Momoi was at the night launch privately
And she had her own Windows 7 launch event to host today as well. Two-shot with Microsoft’s Steven Sinofsky at Yodobashi Akiba.

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.

Short version of Yukarin’s upcoming single’s title song “You & Me” which features m.o.v.e.

“Strawberry ~ Amaku Setsunai Namida~” is the ED to this season’s new anime Nyan Koi!, so sticking with the cat theme of the show, this PV has a cat in it.

Oh and Mingosu is cute in the PV (how do these forever 17/23 year old seiyuus keep looking so young and cute?). The upcoming single release will come with a DVD with the PV on it (first press only of course), worth adding to any Mingosu’s fan collection as this is, if I’m not mistaken, her first solo PV.

Music wise, compared with those fantastic iM@S songs that Mingosu usually performs, this song is hardly going to register on the excitment meter. Though compared with the previous 5pb offerings that Mingosu has been doing this one is definitely leaning more towards the “it’s sort of hummable” level after a few loops.

Someone said that Mingosu looks abit like Horie Yui here (especially the way she poses), what do you think?

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)