Mike: Just subscribe to THAT, Superfani, Yukan and CI and you’ll eventually come across all the posts I write unless exceptions come across (Minimum Tempo that one time).

It was very interesting – I had received my copy of Mechademia I and II earlier this week and one quote by Harumi Befu struck me. It went along the lines of “anime fandom in America isn’t obsessed with Japan…this [xenophilia?] is not structural.” And then I was like “wtf”. I don’t know…Mechademia’s 5th volume or so is about “fanthropology” and maybe I plan to write something about “the case of the weeaboo” from the position of a fan and not a scholar. Though in that sense I am sort of critical (it is an unmerited criticalness perhaps) of Mechademia being written at “us” rather than “within” us – it is not organic literature, though one article by Susan Napier indicated she was lurking a Miyazaki mailing list forum thing for quite some thing, however, the key word is “lurking”. The “identity” or lurker, though, does not alter the position she researched in which was within academia. So in this sense, as people have identified throughout the previous months, I can never really speak for Japan. I don’t know what “idol” really entails in Japan, in Japanese. I can only attempt to assume what it is by what it isn’t via semiotic comparison to other cultures (perhaps a mistake in itself), though that’s probably borderline sophistry and wouldn’t make for a compelling polemic.

Pontifus: Oh I am definitely subject to the [seiyuu] continuum. Inoue Marina? I’m watching it. Aya Hirano? I’ll give it a shot… (20 faces you failed me…) I must say though, after watching Kanon 2006, I have perhaps been hypnotized to the majestic swooning that is Horie Yui. Hirohashi Ryou is another one that begs for indiscriminate following.

You bring up an interesting point with the tsundere continuum, or any other archetypal continuum, that is it the sonority of the seiyuu’s voice or the characters? Similar to that scene vs. sound problem, does the voice hold a continuous connotation that makes it perfectly suitable for the role, or is it the role that suits the voice? Which one inserts meaning into the other? I don’t know, though I’m leaning towards the seiyuu’s more popular representation/reputation than anything else (i.e. social networking, though it may differ in Japan).

Religion, eh? I don’t have any clue on that. After I read Shusaku’s “Silence” I plan (sorta kinda maybe not really perhaps) on doing some investigation into religion in anime since he was a Catholic in Japan (French literature scholar at that) and a lot of his works focus on clashing if not syncretic aspects of socio-theological positioning.

As to the question of why these things happen in Japan, I’d be interested to see how Japanese religion ties in, though I don’t know nearly enough about it myself to throw out any ideas right now. Maybe I’m reaching for a religious connection simply because of the implications of “idol” in English.

It’s a good post. I myself don’t know why this phenomenon occurs in Japan and not in other places: although I’m sure it has a lot to do with their culture, I also don’t know why these voice actors successfully cross the continuum from merely voices to an idol construct. Your observations are salient, as usual, but I couldn’t really add anything more.

Really the idol thing is just (yet) another element which nonplusses me, having grown up without a television and seeing very few films; having anything more than words with which to construct a character confuses me, let alone having to choose between a disembodied voice distributed across unrelated stories and set of discrete individual entities. (I wonder if there’s room to mention that kind of movie actor who is always really playing him or herself.)