Seiyū Events: Promoting Anime and Seiyū by Bringing Anime Characters to Life on Stage

Imagine an anime fan having the chance to meet and interact with their favorite voice actor or actress (seiyū or VA) in person, and then getting to witness a stage show where that person engages with other such actors incharacter, in-voice, or simply as friendly professionals. With exclusive event merchandise, performances, and memories to make with other die-hard fans, such "seiyū events" have become an essential part of promoting anime, and of the media mix constructed around the star value of the animated characters themselves.

For example, at the Kurobas Cup 2015 event held on September 20, 2015,¹ in Makuhari Messe event hall, Ono Kenshō and Ono Yūki—the seiyū of Kuroko Tetsuya and Kagami Taiga from the sports anime Kuroko's Basketball, respectively—bumped fists after singing their duet song from the Character Songs Duet Series, volume 12, audio CD, a gesture that might seem insignificant to an outsider. However, the gesture elicited cheers and screams from audience members, who were—a moment earlier—calmly waving their limited-edition penlights purchased earlier at the event venue. The gesture of a fist-bump between the seiyū characters had taken place many times in the anime, thus leading to a feeling of the gesture being both iconic and nostalgic. Seeing the seiyū complete the gesture in public acknowledged both the audience's connection to the characters and their interpretation of the relationship as valid, providing extra weight and authority to the fans' choice to believe in whatever meaning they ascribed behind the act.

Such moments—where seiyū bring their characters to life through a stylized mix of voice acting and regular stage acting, for the sake of creating lasting audience goodwill—can be witnessed in almost all seiyū events. These events are structured with increased sales in mind, using anime titles, anime characters, and voice actors as promotable brands. This article examines the ways seiyū events in Japan contribute to the promotion of anime titles (as well as the promotion of their seiyū casts to a lesser degree) by providing the audience with limited-edition merchandise to collect and new narratives about characters to consume.

Since almost all events follow a similar structure, I use a sample set of twenty-two seiyū events held over the course of eight years, from 2010 to 2018, to illustrate how each segment of the event serves a different purpose for its promotional mission. Most of these events take place in Tokyo, Chiba, or Yokohama prefectures' event halls, which can host anywhere from five hundred to more than eleven thousand people. They are held to promote all genres of anime from comedy, slice of life, sports, fantasy, demons, and supernatural, catering to different age groups and preferences.

Seiyū in Japan

In Japan, seiyū (声 優), or voice actors, are regarded as celebrities, complete with dedicated fan groups, talent agencies to manage their careers, and magazines covering their news. One might imagine that their beginnings were closely related to the anime world, but with a history that goes back to the 1920s; the original VAs were in fact trained by NHK in 1925 to become voice actors for radio dramas.²

While these radio actors were asked to perform in the dubbed versions of foreign movies in 1955, and later in the dubbed versions of TV dramas, the roles in early sound animation were assigned to celebrities like the comedian Furukawa Roppa and the Takarazuka star Sawa Ranko. The actual debut of seiyū in anime came with the production of Astro Boy and other anime like Space Battleship Yamato, when fans in the 1970s became more critical of the quality of anime in terms of both art and voice acting.³ Henceforth, the production and success of anime shows called for the existence of qualified voice actors who did not just read the script, but rather could become the characters. It was also during the 1970s that anime magazines started including articles about seiyū, promoting them even more and linking them with anime.⁴

Around the 1990s, the duties of the job...