The other day I visited the "Seiyuu Museum" located in Sasazuka, Tokyo.
The Seiyuu(Voice Actor/Actress) Museum was opened by "81 Produce," one of the major Japanese voice talent management groups, on August 8th, 2015. It is a cozy place, but exhibiting many valuable voice talent-related materials, including scripts of dubbing for non-Japanese movies/TV drama and Japanese animes, such as Plein Soleil, Mission Impossible, Gundam, ONE PIECE, etc.
Japan has a 100-year history of voice acting, and full-time voice talents emerged about 50 years ago. Exhibitions mainly cover these 50 years. It was very interesting to see several original scripts with red lines, notes, and amendments by voice actors/actresses. These are realistically showing the professional works of voice talents and directors. You can also see "Seiyuu Shrine" in the museum, where an old SONY microphone is enshrined. All things can be God in this country!
According to a staff of the museum, exhibitions are rotated occasionally. When I visited, materials related to Miyu Matsuki who passed away recently were displayed at the center of the exhibitions. Although exhibitions are in Japanese only, it is worth visiting when you come to Tokyo. It is near the Sasazuka station of Keio Line which is next to Shinjuku.
Google Map
Official web page of Seiyuu Museum and its Twitter
Article on Seiyuu Museum
By the way, Sasazuka is a setting of the novel and anime "Hataraku Mao-sama!"(The Devil is a Part-Timer!). In the anime, for example, the place where Sadao Maou and Emi Yusa encountered is very near the Seiyuu Museum. (The anime was broadcasted before the museum was opened, though.)
In this season(April to June 2016), we can find "gozaru" speaker in the P.A.Works' successful anime "Kuromukuro." Like "Charlotte," the "gozaru" speaker is a younger sister of the main character (hero or heroine), and she deeply likes a specific genre of sub-culture.
Koharu is a younger sister of Yukina, the main character of this anime. Koharu is in third grade and lives with her sister and uncle at the temple. She likes to watch historical dramas("jidaigeki").
Koharu does not usually use "gozaru," but when she talks with Kennosuke, another main character who was a samurai came from the past, she uses "gozaru" at the end of her sentence. We naturally understand that Koharu intentionally uses "gozaru" because she thinks it was used by a samurai.
Meanwhile, Kennosuke does not use "gozaru" at all. He sometimes (especially in episode 5) uses obsolete language, but never say "gozaru" so far. I suppose it was thought that if Kennosuke uses "gozaru," he would be seen too much anachronistic. Although Kennosuke is a samurai who came from the past, actually he pilots a robot. Maybe the character of Kennosuke was very delicate, and creators of this anime thought of the most appropriate language that Kennosuke uses in this drama, which is a mixture of old style and contemporary one.
Back to Koharu's usage. Although she uses "gozaru" as a courtesy to a samurai came from the past (i.e. she does not use "gozaru" as an otaku), we naturally can accept her "gozaru" based on the background that she likes to watch "jidaigeki." This is because a stereotype of otaku young girl who uses "gozaru." Of course, we can not easily find such otaku girls in a real world.
