Saori Hayami, Sakura Tange & Yuko Minaguchi -- Eien Diary（永遠ダイアリー）

Although my buddy got me back into anime once I returned from Japan for good, his other hobby of gaming never infused into me either here or back there. There was a period of several years though when my anime buddy had temporarily given up on the ghost for anime up to 2006 and was more into video games.

Well, perhaps I should revise that first sentence. Actually, in my Ichikawa days, I did buy a Play Station 1 in the mid-1990s on which I played a lot of those arcade games and even one of those do-it-yourself games where I could design and build my own house. However, I never got into some of the games that my friend liked such as those sword-and-sorcery epics.

One of the other habits that also happened during my Ichikawa life was that my buddy would sometimes ask me to receive some of his purchases from Japanese pop culture stores since those establishments wouldn't send their ware overseas and required a Japanese address (that's still the case with Tower Records). I would then dutifully relay the goods over or wait for him or one of his friends to visit so that I could hand over the stuff to him.

Well, as Nozaki-kun and Mikorin will kindly illustrate in the video above, one of the goods that my buddy purchased and had delivered to my home was a couple of dating sim games. He was very generous in even allowing me to try them out if I so desired. I didn't so desire but out of curiosity, I tried one on for size (the game...THE GAME!) and perhaps I made it up to the first five minutes before deciding that this was a little too skeevy for me. When his buddy finally arrived one day to pick up the games, I handed them over with no questions or answers.

Let's jump forward to the present day, shall we? Now that we've been doing the usual anime-and-food outings for several years, this particular song that gets into the anison hour from time to time reminds me of that very brief dating sim experience. And that's because the song is the theme from a dating sim itself called "Love Plus" which came out in 2009.

"Eien Diary" (Eternal Diary) is an alright song (nice jazzy guitar riff in the middle) but I chose it for the blog tonight mostly due to the three seiyuu who play the potential love interests. Saori Hayami（早見沙織）, Sakura Tange（丹下桜）and Yuko Minaguchi（皆口裕子）are now familiar names to me in the anime department but they would've just garnered a blank stare from me at the time that "Love Plus" was first released.

Hayami is now an A-lister but I think that she was at a pretty early stage in her career when she participated in "Love Plus". Tange and Minaguchi had already gained a lot of fame for their starring turns in "Card Captor Sakura"（カードキャプターさくら）and "Yawara!" respectively, but again at the time, anime was a lost art to me, let alone the knowledge of seiyuu. So it was interesting to find out that it was those three behind this theme.

I was able to find out from the JASRAC database that Tatsuji Ueda（上田起士）was the lyricist and Norihiko Hibino（日比野則彦）was the composer for "Eien Diary", and the song is available on the "Love Plus" soundtrack.