Voice Actor Popularity Overseas
“CONCRETE REVOLUTIO” is released simultaneously worldwide; however, in the planning stages, this was never the case.

Mizushima “I hadn’t given any thought to it. The original idea for the story was to take the Showa-period that Sho Aikawa (writer and screenwriter) and I grew up in, and present it as a fictional era called the “Shinka Era.” I did occur to me that it was unlikely that a series that portrayed such a skewed vision of Japan would be unlikely to reach an international audience, so when I heard the idea to release it simultaneously all over the world, I said, “I’m thrilled but, are you sure?” (lol) You can’t give too much attention to the global simultaneous release aspect, though; otherwise you start to lose sight of the spark that made the work good in the first place. The series has a different feel to it and I want people overseas to enjoy it just as it is. In that regard, voice actor popularity overseas and artists like Uesaka-san are highly important. I’m grateful that people watch anime because they want to listen to the voice of a particular voice actor.
In “CONCRETE REVOLUTIO,” the timeline jumps numerous times within any one episode, so I think it’s quite challenging for the actors. It’s a puzzle that we put together, but there are even times that we get confused trying to figure it out. Uesaka-san really pushes her acting muscles to the limits for us.”

Sakurai “When we (Sumire Uesaka and Sakurai) went to Qatar for cultural diplomacy together, one thing that left an impression on me was how all her fans came up and spoke her lines (for the series that Sumire Uesaka had appeared in) in Japanese.”

Uesaka “Qatar was my first time working in cultural diplomacy, so I had no idea what kind of people we would meet or what their reaction would be. So when the people of Qatar came up to me and said things like “Bravo!” or “Dekomori!” (the name of the character, Sanae Dekomori, that Sumire Uesaka played in “Love, Chunibyo & Other Delusions”) or “deesu” (one of the trademark sayings of the character, Dekomori), I was honestly moved.
The following year, Sakurai-san and I went on another cultural diplomacy trip to Moscow where we saw cosplay outfits clearly just brimming with love and wonderful anison karaoke performances in Japanese – it was beyond expectations. At first glance, “CONCRETE REVOLUTIO” seems like a difficult series for people overseas to get into, but you have the “Shinka Era” world which is a reinvention of the Showa period, there’s a whole array of monsters, magical girls, robots, and ghosts, plus a whole bunch of characters that embody the very essence of the Japanese-style hero, so I think people overseas will really enjoy it, and I want to see them cosplay the characters, too!”