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LOL @ the spin machine working at full force. Before Kouhaku, the majority of Nana-chan’s mainstream TV interviews can only be said to be degrading and painful to watch. How things have changed. Look at how they managed to turn one of the biggest lolicon otaku cult fav franchise that is the remake of the original Nanoha (when Nanoha and Fate were still 3rd graders) into something that sounds positive. The difference is striking, in the interview at the 3:15 mark they managed to put on videos of pretty female interviewees, and the guys can easily pass off as normal or even イケメン (ikemen which means good looking/handsome, like the two young guys after the two females), instead of the usual stereotypical pale otaku with glasses and bad hair (ok there was one at around the one minute mark). They even managed to spin the Nanoha movie premiere event into one where it looked as if everyone were there for Nana-chan’s appearance, despite the event has other seiyuu like Yukarin (whose fans are even MORE rabid).

Ah, TV entertainment industry, how manufactured your are.

She did it. So she’s conquered all of the Oricon Weekly Charts (Singles, Album, music DVD, music BD). She’s been on Kouhaku. She’s done a 30k+ audience dome live (What’s a Budoukan live worth now except in nostalogic name recognition’s sake?). You name it, she’s done it. There’s nothing left in the domestic market for her to take aim at except going on a few more TV music shows just to tick them off the secondary “To Do” list, and the harsh reality is starring right in her face that her domestic fanbase has hit the invisible ceiling even after obtaining all these trophy achievements - the number shows that Phantom Minds isn’t her best selling single in its first week, it came first by external circumstances ie the lack of formidable opponents. So here’s a friendly suggestion, nay, a challenge to her managers: how about following the footsteps of JAM Project and take the initiative in bringing her directly to the rest of the world? There’s a whole new market for you to explore and conquer out there. Go on, show us the “Cool Japan” soft-power that you are so proud of. I dare you!

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?

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.

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.

There’s now a sudden huge increase of exposure for Nana-chan on many different mainstream TV stations right after the Kouhaku announcement - she’s probably now going to start registering on some of the average Joe’s radar. The usual Budoukan, Dome live and Oricon top ranking achievements were brought up, instantly impressing those celebrities whom doesn’t know her (so you can see why those are big deals, even though say, that the Budoukan has less seating than Saitama Areana and that the top ranking Oricon album sales is like 1/10th of what it used to be. But once something gets imprinted it stays there for a long time in Japan, or humans in general). There’s also plenty of mentioning about her enka background to reaffirm her singing abilities. It’s interesting that one of the reports talked about the 2ch death threat made to Nana-chan as an indicator of why she is popular amongst the Akiba circle.

Another point worth pointing out is the Nana-chan is one of only two female artists to make a first appearance on Kouhaku (the other being Kimura Kaera).

This deserves it’s own post. So no more “tentatively” sort of pussy-footing around wording, it is 120% confirmed from multiple official sources.

And 2ch goes from mini-party mode to full on celebration mode.

Yahoo’s headline.

NHK’s official line-up list.

EDIT:
Nana-chan’s message as well as her performing a snippet of “Uta no Chikara”, this year’s theme song.

Go get them Nana-chan! You have, without any doubt, proven that you are the best seiyuu artists we’ve been graced upon since seiyuu started singing, no exaggeration as you’ve done something that none of the previous great names such as Hayashibara Megumi or Shiina Hekiru had done. You are the new leader, leading a new revolution of anisong. As a supporter of you since your debuting album, there’s a bit of proudness inside me (and I’m sure fellow fans would agree) to see that we’ve all seen and recongnise the talent and skill you have before the masses.

So Nana-chan just recently blogged about her singing the theme song to Kouhaku “Uta no Chika” (which by the way, is composed by the famous musician Joe Hisaishi and sung by all the singers that are to appear on Kouhaku), and 2ch this morning went on party mode as someone posted a crappy photo of the morning’s Sankei Spots front page saying that Nana-chan is tentatively named to be part of the Red team (which means she’s actually part of the show, not just a tagged on act), and this is double confirmed to not be a crappy Photoshop prank when the news appears on the paper’s website article.

So save some catastrophic change of evidents, we Nanatards can all start celebrating for Nana-chan, and we can possibly see her starting to push further into the mainstream in 2010.

To get the code to the blog part you have to go here and fill in some stuff.

Basically from top to bottom:
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After agreeing to the EUA then just click the gray button on the left to submit your info and you’ll get the code.

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.