seiyuu3

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:
Name of your site
URL of your site
Email address
EUA: Agree/Disagree

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.

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.