Sanada Genichirou to iu na no On The Radio

Here's a review of the 56-minute long "On The Radio" bonus CD included in Sanada Genichirou's solo album, Sho released last month. The guest seiyuu who appears along with Taiten-san is Okiayu Ryoutarou who plays Tezuka Kunimitsu in the anime. Since they are quite close in terms of age and their characters happen to look very mature, they are usually teased as the "ossan" group by fellow seiyuus. First of all, the two begins by talking about Taiten-san's dressing where Okiayu-san mentions that Masayan i.e. Onosaka Masaya who plays Momo always says that Taiten-san copies him in terms of dressing. However, Taiten-san denies this and says that they happen to buy the same clothes at the same place at times thus causing this misunderstanding. Besides, Taiten-san is the type who usually asks people where they buy certain types of clothing but ends up not going there after all (asking for fun?). Anyway, Okiayu-san says that both Taiten-san and Masayan have this chinpira face i.e. gangster look so this may be why they look similar at times in terms of their fashion sense.

Next comes the segment of Taiten-san and Genichirou where he has to state information he knows about his character. Okiayu-san tries to make fun of Taiten-san by asking about the latter's particulars like his birthday and blood group although that is not required in this section. Anyway, Taiten-san manages to say all the information he knows about Genichirou correctly which makes Okiayu-san quite amazed. The interesting thing is, Taiten-san actually went for three auditions before he landed a role in Tenipuri which means he had auditioned for other characters previously. Coincidentally, the roles are Tezuka and Tachibana Kippei from Fudoumine where both of them are also captains like Genichirou and they all happen to look very mature and serious. Given Taiten-san's deep voice, that's not surprising though. As we already know it, Tezuka and Tachibana are played by other seiyuus so it was only until Taiten-san got the role of Genichirou before he actually joined the Tenipuri family.

Frankly speaking, I didn't know about it until I heard this CD so this leads me to wonder what would have happened if Taiten-san got the other two roles. Well, it's quite hard to imagine since I'm so used to the voices of the original seiyuus that I can't visualize how it's like to hear Taiten-san and Okiayu-san switching roles.

Next, they talk about relations between the seiyuus of the various teams. Taiten-san reveals that he hopes for more airtime especially for Rikkai since that will mean that the seiyuus can have a chance to get together again. According to him, the Rikkai seiyuus do not have the opportunity to meet up since he remembered having to be in the studio alone during the Kantou match when his members had gone to the hospital to see Yukimura.

The two then discuss as to which seiyuu team gets along very ell where we get titbits of relationships among the seiyuus. It seems like the Rokkaku team and American Senbatsu team are very close and the members would even meet up outside of work. They also mentioned that the Hyotei team isn't close at all. Does that mean that relations in the anime reflect what it is in real life? I know the Rokkaku team is well-known for its harmonious atmosphere while Hyotei members aren't that chummy on the surface but not to the extent of being unfriendly though...I would have thought that Hyotei members may be closer since they appeared more than once against Seigaku and have relatively more airtime than the other rival teams.

They also talked about the manga which had developed to the stage of Atobe losing the match to Echizen and having his hair shaved off at the time they were recording this CD. According to them, Konomi-sensei mentioned during the Jump Fest that in his mind, the Top 3 strongest players would be Tezuka, Sanada and Yukimura which led the two to comment that the inclusion of Yukimura may be questionable since he never played before and they didn't know how good he was supposed to be.

Taiten-san mentioned that when he first saw Genichirou, he was reminded of the pro-tennis player Matsuoka Shuzo since they were both passionate about tennis. He also said that when doing the scene of Genichirou practising swordplay at home, he couldn't recognise the character at first since Genichirou wasn't wearing his cap at that time. In addition, he feels that there's nothing similar between him and Genichirou in terms of appearance or character.

Taiten-san reveals his schooldays titbits where he can be said to be a relatively high-profile sportsman. He was the vice-chairman of his junior high school's student council and sang during the cultural festival. He was also in the badminton and tennis team at the same time. According to Taiten-san, he joined the badminton team because the coach saw him playing for leisure during physical education class and invited him to be a player. He was able to do smash shots of over 300km/h in badminton which was much faster than the over 200km/h serves which Inui and Ootori could do in the manga and anime. I do believe him because I was in the badminton team before and the shuttlecock being much lighter than the tennis ball, the pace of the game is definitely different.

As for studies, Taiten-san says that he was the type who always asked questions in class and was particularly good at social studies. He's also the type not to waste food and would finish up the school lunches even though he was full. The two then mentioned their bad eating habit of eating quickly which is something they picked up ever since they became seiyuus.

With regards to relationships with other seiyuus, Taiten-san seems rather envious of Okiayu-san going out with drinks with Suwabe Junichi (Atobe Keigo) and Kiuchi Hidenobu (Oshitari Yuushi) and asks him to call him along in future. It is also revealed that Taiten-san and Kiuchi-san has known each other ever since their theatre group days but only got closer after working on Tenipuri. At the time when Taiten-san was in a theatre group, he was still studying in the university.

Talking about the album itself, Taiten-san laments that it was tough to sing all the songs and remember the lyrics. Besides, due to his tight schedule, they actually took 5 months to produce the whole album. In particular, Taiten-san was asked to write a song's lyrics in Nov last year and he only managed to come up with it in Feb this year! Okiayu-san then said that he also wrote one song for his album and they said that it is very tough to write lyrics. They mentioned about Kiuchi-san who is a multi-talented guy to write complete songs on his own and wonders if he's a weirdo. ^__^

At the end of the session, they played a Tenipuri shiritori game where it was over in no time. Although Okiayu-san was supposed to sing a song, "Ningen 50-yen" as punishment, he got Taiten-san to sing along with him. They also played the acchi-muite-hoi game (finger-guessing) when Taiten-san lost but both of them sang a song. When Taiten-san was rounding up the programme, he fumbled again which made Okiayu-san tease him.