Maki Kawase

Maki Kawase (河瀬 茉希, Kawase Maki) is the seiyū for Junko Konno in the anime series, Zombie Land Saga.

Life
Kawase was born in Chiba Prefecture on December 31, 1995. From her elementary school years, she had an interest in manga, which was influenced by her frequent visits to her aunt's house. She first discovered the voice acting profession after learning that a manga that she was reading was receiving an anime adaptation. During her second year in high school, her friends invited her to an event that had a voice actor as a guest speaker. At the time, she was more interested in the work being promoted itself than the guest, but after seeing the guest speak lines, she was impressed to the point of already looking for a voice acting training center after the event finished.

During her third year of high school, Maki enrolled at the Japan Narration Acting Institute, a school she chose because classes were held once a week and high school students were allowed to attend. She also worked part-time in order to pay for the tuition. During her studies, she was surprised to learn that voice actor were expected to learn how to sing and dance as well. After finishing her training program, she became affiliated with the talent agency Arts Vision after passing an audition.

Voice actor
Her debut as a seiyū was in 2015 with small characters and his first leading role came in 2018 with Eru Hoshino (Hisone to Masotan), but it would be with Junko Konno with whom she would achieve recognition not only as a seiyuu but also as a singer. Although she had no singing and dancing experience, the lessons she took in Nichinare served her well. At first, she couldn't even do simple steps and the other seiyuus had experience doing these things, so it was difficult to catch up, even practicing a lot at home. Maki had no idea that voice actors were performing as their respective characters, and never thought she would. That changed once she took the stage and saw the audience in front of her react to her performance, which made all of that effort and practice worth it.

Trivia

 * She likes black tea sweets, is good at drawing, and does fan art on her characters.
 * She is a fan of Disney characters, and her favorite is Baymax.
 * Some say that she has a very strong voice for her age, despite being able to make soft voices.
 * When she's nervous, she tends to talk a lot and very fast, they jokingly call her “talking machine gun”.
 * She cries easily, especially when she is excited or touched.
 * She is fond of drawing pictures of the characters to whom she lends her voice, Junko without exception, creating quite a few pictures of her.
 * On Junko's birthday (September 2), Maki wrote a letter in which she thanked Junko for allowing her to be her voice, which letter was uploaded to her Twitter account.