Hiroshi Masuoka

Half a century of Japanese animation runs through Hiroshi Masuoka's voice, and most of the people raised on it never learned his name. Born in Saitama in 1936 and affiliated with the Tokyo Actor's Consumer's Cooperative Society, he built a career out of one specific register: the reasonable adult standing at the edge of the frame.

Two of his roles are permanent fixtures of Japanese television. He was Masuo, the salaryman son-in-law in Sazae-san, a series that has been going out weekly since 1969. He was Uncle Jam in the Anpanman films, the baker who makes the hero's head. Neither part is showy and both demand the same thing: absolute consistency, week after week, across decades.

He also inherited one of anime's most recognisable voices, taking over Kame-Sennin, the Master Roshi of the Dragon Ball series, from Kohei Miyauchi for the late run of Dragon Ball Z and for Dragon Ball GT, which is not among the credits listed here. Stepping into a voice an audience already loves is thankless work, and he did it without a visible seam.

The rest of the list reads as a tour of postwar anime itself: Gutch in Future Boy Conan, Todd in Sherlock Hound, Cyborg 005 in the Cyborg 009 films, Toshizo in Maison Ikkoku, tokusatsu villains for Gorenger and Changeman, and the magnificently deadpan narration of Nichijou. He died in 2020.