The Japanese are masters of influencing emotions using voice, and I’m often amazed at the eerie beauty of the voices that enter my ear here. If you watch anime in Japanese, of course, you know how talented the Japanese seiyu are, and their ability to bring to life a character that would otherwise be (literally) two-dimensional and inert is one of the major attractions of the genre. But the strangely compelling beauty of Japanese voices isn’t limited to anime: you can find females trained to speak in a uniquely pleasing way in various professions, too, such as female bus guides, who entertain passengers on long sightseeing trips; ground hostesses, those airport employees who call out your flight number in the most delightful sing-song tones; and Japan’s legendary elevator girls, the uninformed women who stand in the elevator and announce each floor for you, although they’ve almost completely disappeared by now. I’ll never forget the time I called NTT, Japan’s sprawling telephone and Internet provider, to get help with some computer hardware. The voice on the other end belonged to an extremely kawaii-sounding female NTT employee, and bastard that I am, I actually expected her to take down my information and then transfer me to some male technician who would tell me how to fix my problem. I was quite surprised when the cute voice quickly proceeded to help me debug my router and fix the TCP/IP problem I’d been having, solving it in no time. I had to hang my head in shame for a while after that.
The voice of Kanna from AnoNatsu is a big part of her charm.
(Same voice actress as Madoka from Lagrange as it would happen.)
