The Power of Voice in Japan

The Japanese are masters of influencing emotions using voice, and I'm often amazed at the eerie beauty of the voices that enter my ear here. If you watch anime in Japanese, of course, you know how talented the Japanese voice actresses are, and their ability to bring to life a character that would otherwise be (literally) two-dimensional and inert is one of the major attractions of the genre. One of the most popular voice actresses in Japan today is Aya Hirano, who provides the voices for Haruhi Suzumiya, Konata from Lucky Star and Misa from Death Note, and she can do the most amazing things with a character. But the strangely compelling beauty of Japanese voices isn't limited to anime: you can find females who are specially trained to speak in a uniquely soft way in various professions, too, such as female bus guides, who entertain passengers on long sightseeing trips; ground hostesses, those airport employees who call out your flight number in the most delightful sing-song tones; and Japan's legendary elevator girls, the uniformed women who stand in the elevator and announce each floor for you (although they've almost completely disappeared). It's hard to describe the quality of these sweet voices, which are made possible by weeks or months of vocal training -- there's something about the way they dip down and back up again at the end of a sentence that casts a spell over me. But speaking in a cute voice isn't just for a few professions with high customer visibility. I'll never forget the time I called NTT, Japan's sprawling telephone and Internet provider, to get help with some computer hardware I was having problems with. The voice on the other end belonged to an extremely kawaii-sounding female NTT employee, and bastard that I am, I actually expected her to take down my information and then transfer me to some male technician who would tell me how to fix my problem. I was quite surprised when the cute voice quickly proceeded to help me debug my router and fix the TCP/IP problem I'd been having, solving it in no time. I had to hang my head in shame for a while after that.