User:Dandy Sephy/Megumi Hayashibara

Megumi Hayashibara (林原 めぐみ) (born March 30, 1967) is a Japanese seiyū, singer, radio personality andlyricist from Tokyo.

Biography
Megumi Hayashibara was born on March 30, 1967 in Tokyo, Japan. She has one older brother. Hayashibara studied at a Catholic school, and at one point was bullied in fifth grade. She was an active club member and participated in the Badminton, Biology, Broadcasting, Drama and English clubs. She played the role of Alice in an English language production of Alice in Wonderland, although the English club had volunteered her for the role. She had hoped to get an automatic entry into nursing school, however she eventually had to take an exam after getting a failing grade in Maths II. As an act of rebellion, Hayashibara arrived at her high school graduation with a perm, which was against school rules.

Despite qualifying as a nurse, she has never been employed in a nursing position. On 30 March 1999, she married. On January 10, 2004, she announced on her radio show that she was pregnant with her first child. In June of the same year, she gave birth to a daughter.

Hayashibara's hobbies include Telephone cards, The Planetarium, Powerstones, cooking, Perfume, Flowers and Aromatherapy.

Voice acting
Hayashibara's first interest in becoming a seiyuu came from watching Space Battleship Yamato in sixth grade. On the same day as submitting an application for nursing school, Hayashibara went to a book store and found an advert offering free anime voice acting auditions at Arts Vision. Several months after submitting a demo tape, she received a confirmation of passing the first stage of the audition, and eventually decided to continue training as a nurse while doing voice acting. At the third stage audition she was picked out of 600 applicants. While at the training center, Shiba Chigeru was her trainer. After a year of voice actor training, Hayashibara was chosen to voice small roles on Maison Ikkoku. Her first credited role was as a kindergarten student. Initially, she had difficulty with her lines and had to redo many lines after the main recording sessions. Hayashibara later auditioned for Ranma ½ expecting to be cast asAkane Tendo, but was cast as Ranma Saotome instead. However it was not immediately decided if she would play the role of male Ranma or female Ranma until the last minute.

In 1993 and 1995, Hayashibara was a guest at Anime America. At the 1995 event, she decided to give a speech in English before a small concert after believing the translation at the 1993 event did not reflect what she had said.

In 1995, Hayashibara provided the voice of Rei Ayanami in Neon Genesis Evangelion after originally auditioning for Kotono Mitsuishi's role of Misato Katsuragi. Hayashibara's role as Rei was referred to as "innovative casting".

Hayashibara is often referred to as "The Queen of Seiyuu", and as of 2007 had over 236 credits. As well as voice acting in anime, Hayashibara also does live action, commercials and narrating.

Won the Animage Seiyuu award 12 times.

 

         

Radio
While at nursing school, she started a temporary job as a DJ at a local ice skating rink. After becoming better known as a voice actress, she was given her own Radio show, "Heartful Station". After 17 shows, the broadcasting station cancelled the show and other anime related programming to concentrate on traditional music. However, 6 months later, Hayashibara started a new radio show at another broadcaster. Tokyo Boogie Night began during 1992 on TBS Radio.

Hayashibara has held several events, public recordings and concerts to celebrate reaching milestones in the recordings of her radio shows. On March 30, 1994, a event was held for the 100th Tokyo Boogie Night broadcast. On August 11, 1997 an event was held for the 300th Heartful Station broadcast, followed by a 300th Tokyo Boogie Night Event. The events for the 500th broadcasts took place on April 29, 2001 for Heartful Station and January 27, 2002 for Tokyo Boogie Night. The 600th broadcasts events took place on July 27, 2003 for Heartful Station and March 27, 2004 for Tokyo Boogie Night. On April 17, 2005 a 700th Heartful Station event took place, followed by a 700th Tokyo Boogie Night event on April 30, 2006. On April 21, 2007, Hayashibara celebrated the 800th edition of Heartful Station, followed by the 800th Tokyo Boogie Night on November 3, 2007. On March 7, 2009, Hayashibara celebrated the 900th edition of Heartful Station with a public recording and concert. A similar event was held on October 4, 2009 to celebrate the 900th edition of Tokyo Boogie Night.

Music career
Hayashibara is signed to Starchild, the anime production and soundtrack division of King Records.

The first song she recorded was Yokae no Shooting Star, a song from Gundam 0080. At first she had difficulty singing and her producer purposely gave her harder songs to sing so she would improve.

Her first album to be released was Half and Half, which was released on March 21, 1991 and reached position 45 on the Oricon charts. Almost a year later, Whatever was released on March 5, 1992 and was the first album to feature self penned lyrics. The album placed 18 on the Oricon charts. This was followed by Perfume on August 5, 1992, which reached position 13. On August 23, 1993 Shamrock was released, reaching position 12. Sphere was released on July 2, 1994, reaching position 8. Enfleurage was released on March 3, 1995 and reached position 6. On November 01, 1996, Bertemu was released, reaching position 3. Iráváti was released on August 6, 1997 and peaked at position 5. Fuwari was released on October 27, 199 and reached position 5.

During 2000, two compilations were released of previous material. On April 26, Vintage S was released, reaching position 6. This was followed on June 21 by Vintage A, which reached position 4. After a 2 year gap, Feel Well was released on June 26, 2002, reaching position 7. Center Color was released on January 7, 2004 and reached position 10. On April 21, 2007 Plain was released, reaching position 18. Tanoshii Douyou was released on April 27, 2007 and reached position 70. Slayers MEGUMIX was released on July 25, 2008.

In 2002, the single Northern Lights reached position number 3 in the Oricon weekly singles charts setting a record for the highest singles ranking for a seiyu. The record stood until 2005.

Writing
Hayashibara wrote a series of comics for Anime V magazine, with artwork by Sakura Asagi. The comics talked about her personal life and career. The individual chapters were collected into the book "There is always Tomorrow" (明日があるさ). Hayashibara has also contributed two columns to Newtype.