Japan Character Awards held in Tokyo, 'Chiikawa' emerges as winner

Tokyo [Japan], July 8 : In the recently held Japan Character Awards in Tokyo, 'Chiikawa' emerged as the winning character with several companies in attendance who shared their knowledge and strategies revolving around animated characters.
"Chiikawa" means "Small and Cute" and cute animals and animated characters have always remained popular in Japan, especially among youngsters.
"We are preparing various tie-in promotions and plans for the future, so please look forward to Chiikawa's activities in the future. We will do our best to make "Chiikawa" a representative character of Japan, so please support us, said Yoichi Kawakami of Spiral Cute.
"Shirotan" the white seal, also has 23 years of long history which is a plush toy character, but now also appears in a hug pillow and a short animated cartoon.
"This year is Shirotan's 23rd anniversary. The white, fluffy, and chewy character is loved by both men and women, and it is loved by many generations. Innocent character is loved by everyone, and we will bring them to people all over the world," Koji Kanai of Creative Yoko said in a statement.
This is computer software that combines songs with a favorite voice. It is called "Vocaloid".
It is also used for the promotion of characters on the website.
"We have 4 Vocaloid characters. The Singer character is uploaded with the user-created song as a "Vocaloid". Vocaloid" is a general word for software that synthesizes a singing voice into animations and characters," stated Masatoshi Takagi, MTK, adding that they make character goods based on the request of video users.
We support multiple languages, so we are also looking at requests from foreign countries, he added.
Japanese character business is developing rapidly in the global market. It has motivated Japan to create new characters.