Otakon - Hikaru Midorikawa

The panel discussions for voice actors, both Japanese-language and English-language performers, have been among the most popular at conventions. But few have drawn the reception of Hikaru Midorikawa, the man who voiced Tamahome in Fushigi Yuugi, Heero Yui in Gundam Wing and Zelgadis in slayers. Midorikawa's panel appearance was so popular that fans overstuffed the original room scheduled for the event. With people spilling into the hall, Otakon moved the event to a room that was twice as large. And then when Midorikawa arrived, he was met with a chorus of cheers and screams. The audience was made mostly of young women, and they hung on every one of Midorikawa's words. The actor spoke exclusively Japanese, but the fans still loved the dreamy quality of his voice, begging him to deliver their favorite lines, and breaking into applause and cheers when he said them. It was the most enthusiastic reception for a voice actor that this author has seen at an anime convention.

Midorikawa told the audience that he always wanted to be a voice actor from childhood, and joined the drama club when he went to high school. After he graduated from high school, he went to work for a subsidiary of a company that also offered a school for voice acting. "You had to be able to read lines and deal with pantomiming and learn some drama terms," Midorikawa said. "I went into it with the best of intentions to study art, but everyone was just like me and wanted to be a voice actor. Everyone else worked hard, but I just slacked off." While he started studying anime performance by other actors when he became a professional, Midorikawa said he avoided that at acting school at the advice of his professor. "He told me I shouldn't watch any anime at all because I wouldn't have any style or originality. It would be only a mish mash of others' styles - so I didn't watch any anime."

"In this business you don't want to be a fan...you want to draw fans, so I had to go from wanting to being wanted, and it was a good thing." The change Midorikawa had to make in his life was something out of My Fair Lady. He was born in a long distance outside of Tokyo and the people there spoke a dialect that didn't match the Tokyo style of speaking that is the preferred Japanese accent. Midorikawa had to learn to speak Tokyo style and eliminate his rural accent. "I still have that accent problem," he noted. "Even for one line, I was so conscious of my accent problem that I couldn't say that line. I had to practice to get rid of the accent and it took a long, long time."

Pictures

Panels