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.

It’s hard to pinpoint who is responsible for something like this - either the producers at Bandai Namco are closet seiyuu ota or that the huge commercial success of IDOLM@STER means the marketing guys are dictating that every music game by Bandai Namco must have otaku appeal. The upcoming Happy Dance Collection (tentative title) game by Bandai Namco for the Nintendo Wii will feature a mascot character voiced by Mizuki Nana, not only that, but Nana-chan will also be singing a whopping total of 4 original songs for this dancing game. Besides the Nana-chan songs, there will be a bunch of well-known J-pop, old and new anime songs, and of course let’s not forget, IDOLM@STER songs.

While no definite dates are given, the game is scheduled to come out this year. With the huge penetration of the Wii, this might be a great opportunity for Nana-chan to get her name out amongst the general population. For seiyuu (Nana-chan) fans like us, who could pass up the opportunity to dance to Mizuki Nana and iM@S songs? I don’t know about you but I’m buying this for sure.

(The original story ran at Kotaku, but obviously they wouldn’t notice the deep seiyuu angle of this story)

Early reports are out - Nakajima Megumi’s debut single released under her character Ranka Lee in Macross Frontier sold an amazing 35,000 to grab fifth spot on the Oricon Weekly Charts. Extra bit of trivia - All 4 Macross Frontier CDs released thus far had ranked in the top 10 on the Oricon Weekly Charts during their release week, proving the draw power of the Macross brand.

I’ve been rather enjoying the contrasting differences between the songstresses of Macross Frontier, and they did a particularly good job at matching May’n (as Sheryl’s singing voice) against that of Nakajima Megumi. While May’n has a powerful and confident delivery of a veteran performer that belies her true experience, Nakajima Megumi has a diamond in the rough quality which really adds to the overall experience of watching (listening) her raise that is captivating in a different way.

Now let’s just hope the series will continue to deliver great music.

Completely unexpected - Animelo’s official site has pre-announced that THE IDOLM@STER will be attending the Sunday session of Animelo Summer 2008.

THE IDOLM@STER is the group of seiyuu behind the Bandai Namco game of the same name, and the members are:
Nakamura Eriko (Amami Haruka)
Imai Asami (Kisaragi Chihaya)
Ochiai Yurika (Hagiwara Yukiho)
Nigo Mayako (Takatsuki Yayoi)
Wakabayashi Naomi (Akizuki Ritsuko)
Takahashi Chiaki (Miura Azusa)
Kugimiya Rie (Minase Iori)
Hirata Hiromi (Kikuchi Makoto)
Shimoda Asami (Futami Ami, Mami)
Hasegawa Akiko (Hoshii Miki)

Not to be confused with the spin-off anime Idolmaster Xenoglossia made by Sunrise with an entirely different cast of seiyuu, THE IDOLM@STER and the seiyuu behind them had gain a strong cult following thanks to devoted otakus posting self-made AMV on video sharing sites such as nico nico douga and Youtube, and the makers proping up the interest by continously releasing some pretty decent songs for the fans to play with. There are some fairly talented singers in the group - Imai Asami and Takahashi Chiaki are especially skillful which I greatly admire and respect, while others like Shimoda Asami and Hasegawa Akiko had also came a long way.

Finer details will be revealed tomorrow night at 7pm Tokyo time, probably related to whether the entire cast will be available at the concert or not. To this date I think they have never managed to assemble the entire cast for any events, including THE IDOLM@STER’s own events. Kugimiya Rie and Ochiai Yurika are currently the two with the most “no show” record - both of which had cited scheduling issues as the reason behind it. While it’s understandable that Kugimiya Rie with her “tsundere queen” status which leads to her voice being on everything from anime to consumer electronics thus naturally comes with a super cluttered schedule, on the other hand for the relatively unknown Ochiai “Yurishii” Yurika many otakus speculate this is due to her links with the Arts Vision scandel leading her to be surpressed within the industry. Here’s hoping they can actually get everyone there as it would be a spectacular sight to have them all on stage.

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)

According to her latest blog post, Minorin will be releasing her second single of the year on August 6th. The title of the single is 雨上がりの花よ咲け (Ameagari no Hana yo Sake). The date suggests heavily to me that they are planning to get this out before Animelo for some promotional effects.

I wasn’t terribly impressed with Melty tale storage, and I’m starting to worry about Lantis’ spam tactics when it comes to their seiyuu and anime song releases - it seems they just don’t really know what to do with their seiyuu talents, they just know that they are popular and need to pump out CD after CD, but without actually finding the right direction for their artists to go along with.

Anyway, I’m still cautiously optimistic. So let’s see where this one will go.

PS. I’m now a member of Minorin’s official fanclub “Minori Smile Season (m.s.s)”, will be getting the fanclub goodies in a week’s time, woot!

So I got my Live Formula DVD from Amazon JP (great bargain there btw @ 4600yen, I’ll talk about it a little later, maybe) and I just had to re-live and share this mesmerizing moment:

It’s all about the arpa (Italian for harp) - the arpa in the composition adds another dimension to the music of the song which you don’t find often in your average pop-inspired anisong. The off vocal version of Heart-shaped Chant, one of the rare off vocals which I actually listen to, shows this off quite well, but watching it being performed live is yet another level altogether.

The arpa performer, both in the original score and in the video, is Agematsu Mika - she’s the sister of Elements Garden’s Agematsu Noriyasu (Eternal Blaze, Dancing in the velvet Moon etc) and is a renouned award winning professional arpa player. Her official page has an English version so you can read about her there. Apparently when they originally recorded the song, Agematsu Mika just went in to the studio and played her arpa impromptu. She deserves major credit for making Heart-shaped Chant into such a special song, without her arpa, I seriously doubt I would like the song as much as I currently do.