Hogwarts Legacy voice actor lends talent to Japan’s Satsuma Hogwarts meme

The release of Hogwarts Legacy has led to Japanese users on Twitter creating the concept of Satsuma Hogwarts (薩摩ホグワーツ) (related article). The meme has proven to be incredibly popular, so much so that a Japanese voice actor who worked on Hogwarts Legacy tried his hand at reading these posts aloud.

※本稿はこちらの日本語記事を編集・翻訳したものです（the original Japanese article can be found here)

Satsuma refers to the Satsuma Province, one of Japan’s former provinces that now forms the western half of Kagoshima Prefecture. The majority of the Satsuma Hogwarts tweets are users imagining what it would be like if there was a wizarding school located in the Satsuma of Harry Potter’s world.

The term was coined by Twitter user @Maguro_Maznaga, who explained that it initially referred to Hogwarts students who come from Satsuma (assuming such students exist). However, the term drew a great deal of attention from users who came up with their own theories based on the literal meaning of the words, and these varying ideas became jumbled together. Eventually, Satsuma Hogwarts started to refer to an imaginary wizarding school located in Satsuma and became the much-loved meme that it is today.

Many of the tweets include lines of dialogue that you might expect to hear at Satsuma Hogwarts, and recently, there have been some users who have tried reading this dialogue aloud. Even Setsuji Sato, who provided the Japanese voices for multiple characters in Hogwarts Legacy, got in on the fun, lending his performance skills to the world of Satsuma Hogwarts and attracting a lot of attention in the process.

Sato read some dialogue spoken by the Sorting Hat, a sentient magical hat from the Harry Potter series that can speak. When a student puts on the Sorting Hat, it decides which of Hogwarts’ four houses—Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw, and Slytherin—they most belong to. In Sato’s reading, after pompously saying, “You are…” the Sorting Hat then begins to say, “Gryf-” before immediately cutting itself off and enthusiastically exclaiming, “Satsuma Domain!”

At this point, we are no longer dealing with a wizarding school located in Satsuma, but rather a Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry that has had the Satsuma Domain thrown into it.

The tweet that seemingly served as the source of Sato’s reading was actually based on a scene from the film Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, not Hogwarts Legacy. Funnily enough, the Sorting Hat does appear in the game, and Sato was the one who voiced it in Japanese.

Other users also took a stab at reciting some of the Satsuma Hogwarts material. Notably, Twitter user @9Do0G did multiple readings of spell incantations by Satsuma Hogwarts students, and they all turned out to be very popular.

Satsuma Hogwarts students are also said to be practitioners of Jigen-ryu, a style of swordsmanship that was widely used in the real Satsuma Domain and is characterized by the vigorous shouts that accompany attacks. Students of Satsuma Hogwarts even cast their spells with Jigen-ryu-style incantations, which @9Do0G provided personal renditions of.

Hogwarts Legacy is incredibly popular, even in Japan, and the Satsuma Hogwarts meme has branched out in different ways. Will users continue to harness their imaginations and embed even more Satsuma elements into the world of Harry Potter?

Written by. Marco Farinaccia based on the original Japanese article (original article’s publication date: 2023-02-18 10:49 JST)