Let's Learn About Japanese Culture with 'Game Center Girl'!

What happens when a cute British girl goes into a game center in Tokyo and finds love? Cultural Exchange With a Game Center Girl is a cute show about a blonde-haired (of course!) girl from the UK who moves to Japan. She’s fascinated with the large video game arcades in Tokyo…and accidentally discovers cultural communication and romance inside one!

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Will you be watching Game Center Shoujo?

Can Love and Cultural Sharing Blossom in a Japanese Game Center?

The ‘monster anime season‘ is upon us, and fans are inundated with shows to watch. We’ve got highly anticipated continuations of beloved anime (My Dress Up Darling, Seishun Buta Yaro, Kaiju No. 8, Panty & Stocking), other popular series continuing (Shield Hero, Rent A Girlfriend, Vending Machine), plus lots of brand-new stories that we hope will find an audience.

One of these new series is Game Center Shoujo to Ibunka Kouryuu, aka Cultural Exchange With a Game Center Girl. It’s about a cute gamer girl who loves learning about Japan through video games, and who finds a friend in a game center.

The Story of Game Center Shoujo

Renji Kusakabe works at a game arcade in Tokyo. One day, a young foreigner named Lily Baker comes in to try the video games, and Renji shows her some of the best games to play. When she has trouble snagging a plush toy from a crane game, he gets the toy for her, telling her it’s a Valentine’s Day gift. She misunderstands, and a cute sort-of romance starts to blossom between the two characters.

The anime is based on the manga by Hirokazu Yasuhara, which has run for ten volumes. Since there’s a lot of material for the anime to draw from, I hope we can get a solid season with lots of great episodes!

The Rise of Bilingual Seiyuu

One of my pet peeves in anime is when Japanese voice actors who do not speak English at all are nevertheless forced to read lines in English. Hideaki Anno just loves doing this, and often forces his cast to speak English, despite having zero skill with the language. In my opinion, if an anime character needs to speak a foreign language fluently in a scene, the voice actor should…actually be able to speak that language?

There’s no need to worry about listening to a bunch of terrible katakana English in Cultural Exchange With a Game Center Girl, thanks to Sally Amaki, the amazing bilingual voice actress who’s great at both languages. She’s fully Japanese, but grew up in Los Angeles, so she had exposure to both languages.

I Once Wanted My Daughter to Be a Seiyuu

I have an admission to make. When Sally Amaki burst onto the anime scene in 2023 by playing both English and Japanese voice roles for Carol Olston in Tomo-chan is a Girl!, I was actually a little jealous, because I’d always wanted this kind of role for my daughter.

My kids had the good (?) luck to be born in Japan to a father who’d studied linguistics with a focus on bilingualism and child language acquisition in university. From the moment they were born, I dedicated myself to creating the perfect environment for my kids to become bilingual in both English and Japanese. I would import all our DVDs from the US, telling them, “If you want to watch Harry Potter, sorry but you have to do it in English. There are no Japanese versions.” I even imported anime like Magical Knight Rayearth and watched it dubbed with them, pretending that there was only an English track on the DVDs.

Since my daughter was also great at mimicking any voice she heard, I thought she’d be a natural for the seiyuu world. She could voice any character in Japanese, then turn around and do it in English, before even breaking for lunch. What changed my mind was the excellent Sore ga Seiyu! (Seiyu’s Life) anime, which followed three up-and-coming voice actresses as they tried to break into the competitive seiyuu world. The anime highlighted how difficult it was to get any roles, and how often you had to repeat your name and the name of the talent agency you work for just to get a director to remember who you are. I didn’t think it was something she could spend years doing.

Would You Like to Visit the Arcade from Game Center Girl? You Can!

All modern anime are set in real locations, so it’s easy to plan a visit on your next trip to Japan. The real-world settings — known as 聖地 seichi or “holy lands” in Japanese — for Game Center Shoujo to Ibunka Kouryuu are set in Tokorozawa, in Saitama Prefecture. You can go into the GiGO Tokorozawa game center and start having lots of fun! (Just note: you’ll have to bring your own British girl — they don’t hand them out!)

What kind of show will this eventually be? Kin’iro Mosaic, but with video game references? Hi-Score Girl, but with more focus on romance? No matter what it ends up being, I’m here for it.

Thanks for reading this blog post about the Cultural Exchange With a Game Center Girl anime. Do you like the cross-cultural vibe of this anime? Tell us in the comments below!

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