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A lot of you probably know about Kevin Bacon and how he's supposedly the most connected among Hollywood artists.

Who is the most-connected anime voice actor (seiyuu)?

I've seen in some places that either of Yuji Ueda or Megumi Hayashibara could be the Kevin Bacon of seiyuu, but has anybody ever done the graph of the interconnections between voice actors to support this claim?

(I'm only counting voices in the original Japanese, and not dubs.)

あき 心太郎
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  • Great question! AnimeNewsNetwork tends to be the most comprehensive about enumerating all voice actors credited for any given show, so that's probably the place to start if somebody wants to scrape this data. – senshin Sep 25 '16 at 10:17
  • Took a bit of a look myself and found this site: http://oracleofbacon.org/movielinks.php It goes through IMDB to find connections for you, but you need to enter the names of who you're trying to connect. So I guess this provides the results if you're willing to put in the searches... – Gorp Oct 03 '16 at 13:20
  • What does "most connected in sixth degrees" supposed to mean? – 絢瀬絵里 Jul 25 '18 at 10:26
  • @絢瀬絵里 Pin photographs of every seiyuu on a large cork-board. Connect two photographs with string if the two seiyuu worked together on at least one project. The "most connected" seiyuu is the one with the most pieces of string coming from them. "Six degrees" refers to the idea that you can get from any photo to any other by following no more than six lengths of string. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_separation – EightAndAHalfTails Jul 26 '18 at 14:17
  • I put my bet on Sugita Tomokazu then. Gintama alone provides him with lots of connections. – 絢瀬絵里 Jul 26 '18 at 15:34
  • This question attracts a lot of speculations and opinions and over no citations as to why and how these voice actors are connected. User polling is an very unreliable benchmark as it skews towards popularity. Popular new seiyuus may not be as connected as others, even retired ones. If there's anyone that's connect it's likely the producers as it's their job to have their fingers in as many pies as they can, if they want to be successful. If you wish to have it reopened, please provide criteria that answerers can make to satisfy whatever condition you are looking for. I.E. Be specific. – кяαzєя Oct 30 '18 at 19:28
  • A seiyuu can be unpopular in circles and still be well connected, and the vice versa can be true. Popularity is a very poor gauge for networking, sure it opens doors, but not all doors lead to good connections. – кяαzєя Oct 30 '18 at 19:32
  • @кяαzєя I think this question has a very clear objective answer; the only hurdle is the data crunching. In the [Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Degrees_of_Kevin_Bacon), two actors are connected if they appear in a film together. "Most-connected" I believe refers to the metric used by the Oracle site to determine how good a centre someone is, i.e. the weighted average of the degree of separation of all the people who link to that particular person. OP specifically mentions the graph of interconnections, and is evidentally looking for a data-based answer. – ahiijny Nov 01 '18 at 08:02
  • I don't believe that that there is enough information to objectively answer this. The kevin bacon six degree of seperation theory itself is a contested topic based on sensationalism and speculation. Furthermore the career lifespan of a voice actor is much shorter than that of an actual actor. Some fade away while others retire in a span of months to years. Few last the test of time. I believe it to be too broad of a scope to be reasonably covered if it is even provable with objective data. – кяαzєя Nov 01 '18 at 19:09
  • If you wish to contest the viability of this subject, please make use of our meta for any continue discussions: https://anime.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4197/policy-revision-the-appropriateness-of-boardly-scope-questions-based-on-a-conte – кяαzєя Nov 01 '18 at 19:10

2 Answers2

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I don't know the specific answer for "most connected" seiyuu, but many companies did some ranking for seiyuu.

Oricon (Japanese) has a user-vote based ranking. Most known seiyuu is Nobuyo Oyama (e.g. Doraemon) and Masako Nozawa (e.g. Goku from Dragon Ball).

AppBank (Japanese) also has a ranking based on votes from other seiyuu. Top 3 is Koichi Yamadera, Masako Nozawa and Keiji Fujiwara. I think Yamadera is selected because there are lots of seiyuu worked with him.

I want to put my 2 cents to Koichi Yamadera because he has long career and variety of anime.

Aki Tanaka
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kumagoro
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    Reading from the article source, I'm afraid this doesn't really answer the question. Both rankings are about popularity ranking, but that doesn't say anything about their connection with other seiyuu... – Aki Tanaka May 26 '18 at 07:17
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It’s not that Kevin Bacon is the most connected, he’s just the arbitrary starting point that the creators of the concept used to demonstrate their point. Any A list actor that’s been working for more than a few years is only a couple of degrees away from the entire entertainment industry.

The idea of 6 degrees of separation is that everyone is connected to everyone, especially when you are in the same industry/subculture. I myself am 4 degrees away from JRR Tolkien, meaning that everyone reading this is now 5 degrees away at minimum.

Mr. F
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