Interest

Gundam's Tohru Furuya to Play Detective Conan's Tohru Amuro

Minami Takayama, the voice of the title character in the Detective Conan (Case Closed) anime, revealed with a laughing emoticon on Friday that the character Tohru Amuro will debut in the anime in September — voiced by none other than Tohru Furuya.

Tohru Amuro appears in Gōshō Aoyama's original manga Spoiler (highlight the following white text to read) as a member of the Black Organization. Not coincidentally, the voice actor Tohru Furuya happens to be best known for playing the lead character Amuro Ray in the classic robotic mecha anime Mobile Suit Gundam. (The spellings are different, but the pronunciations are the same.)

Update: For decades, Japanese television hosts have noted the coincidental similarity in names between the fictional Amuro Ray (debuted in 1979) and still another Amuro — the real-life singer Namie Amuro (born in 1977). Gundam creator Yoshiyuki Tomino told Ai Ijima in an interview that he coined the name Amuro because he though it was a strange name that did not exist in the world.

Three months after the first Gundam anime series premiered, Tomino found out that there is a real island named Amuro in Okinawa, and he visited the island after the series ended. (Namie Amuro comes from Okinawa.) On Gundam's 30th anniversary, Namie Amuro and Amuro Ray starred in an animated Gundam music video together, and Furuya naturally played Amuro Ray in the video.

Update 2: Plot spoiler information obscured. Thanks, MKVarana. Both the manga and the anime already feature a character named Shuuichi Akai. The character happens to be voiced by Shuuichi Ikeda, who is famous for playing Amuro's nemesis Char Aznable or "Akai Suisei" (Red Comet). Thanks, rrizqiw.