Masaru Ikeda

Half a century of Japanese voice acting runs through Masaru Ikeda's credits, which in that industry means being present for the invention of most of it. A Tokyo native and a graduate of the Tokyo Metro Fifth Commerce Senior High School, he was affiliated with the Tokyo Actor's Consumer's Cooperative Society, and his earliest screen work reaches back to live action tokusatsu with a bit part in Ultraseven in 1967.

The voice was low, dry and unhurried, so the roles clustered around men in charge and men past their prime. He was Yatter-Wan in Yatterman, Ikki Yoneda in Sakura Taisen, Pasco in Future Boy Conan, President Boon in Metropolis, Huang in Darker than Black, Koreyoshi Kitamura in Death Note, Neuen Bitter in the Gundam 0083 films, and Nekomamushi in One Piece. He was also the standard Japanese dub voice of Danny Glover, which is its own kind of career: for a generation of Japanese viewers, Glover simply sounded like Ikeda.

Later credits such as Yukio in Usagi Drop show the softer, grandfatherly register he grew into, and he was still taking parts in the 2010s, including Lauri Echevarria in Knight's & Magic. He died on 31 January 2026, at the age of 83, having worked from the 1960s into the 2010s as one of those performers whose name most viewers never learn and whose voice they would recognise instantly.