LOCATING THE SEIYŪ: "FLATNESS" IN MODERN JAPANESE VOICE ACTORS' PERFORMATIVITY

Abstract

Scholarship on seiyū, or Japanese voice actors, has tended to focus only on the rich textual quality of their on-screen performances, and has ignored the structural factors that sustain the industry. Seiyū performances, both on-screen and off-screen, are highly malleable and engineered to successfully respond to the ecology of fans, local culture, and the industry that supports them, which makes seiyū performativity an ideal site to observe how these interrelated forces intersect. I argue that seiyū performances today are characterised by a sense of “flatness”, a metaphor to describe the way traditional boundaries are broken down and seiyū performative identities are crushed into one, de-hierarchised plane by market forces. This flattening can be seen in the way seiyū corporeal bodies, seiyū voices, and fictional bodies merge into one, as well as the way corporeal seiyū identity is entangled in representations of gendered bodies. Flattening also occurs at an industrial level with the seiyū industry and Japanese entertainment industry, and trickles down to the seiyū who converge with mainstream Japanese celebrities, but at the same time they leverage their proximity to the otaku community to create a particular fan intimacy that sees them merge with otaku fan identity.