Shimba Tsuchiya

Shimba Tsuchiya was working on screen as a child: he plays Toshio Saeki in the 2009 horror sequel The Grudge 3, which remains the credit most non-Japanese viewers have seen him in without knowing it. He was born in Tokyo in 1996, is affiliated with the Himawari theatre company, and comes from a performing family, with two older sisters, the model Honoka and the actress Tao Tsuchiya.

The adult career is almost entirely voice work, and the casting bracket is specific: earnest boys one rung below the protagonist, who mean well and are slightly too loud about it. Tsutomu Goshiki in Haikyu!! is the definitive version, a first-year with far more ambition than polish, and Tsuchiya finds real comedy in that gap without ever making the character pathetic.

He got a lead of his own as Tatara Fujita in Welcome to the Ballroom, which asks for something harder: a passive character slowly learning to want something. The rest of the run is the working voice actor's spread across a decade, taking in sports anime, music-school drama, police comedy and Gundam. Sound! Euphonium has followed him from the 2015 series through to the final films, which is about as clear a signal of standing in that industry as a credit list can give.