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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.

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.

Real life Maria serving you, imagine that.

The omelette rice surely would taste more than a measly 3 times better.

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.

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?).