Yoshito Yasuhara

Yoshito Yasuhara belongs to Theatre Echo, a comedy-sketch troupe that doubles as a talent agency, and has worked out of it for his whole career. His screen work starts in the mid-1970s, at the moment Japanese television animation stopped being aimed only at small children: he was Kenjiro Ota on Space Battleship Yamato in 1974 and carried the part through the feature films that followed, in 1978, 1979, 1980 and 1983.

Most of the 1970s and 1980s work is serial animation of the kind that ran a year at a time: Nobody's Boy: Remi, Future Boy Conan, The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, Gordian Warrior, Future Robot Daltanious. He was Louis XVI in The Rose of Versailles in 1979, a harder assignment than it sounds, since the part asks a weak man to stay sympathetic while history removes his options.

What distinguishes him is duration. He voiced Toshio Utsumi in Cat's Eye in 1983 and returned to the same character forty years later for LUPIN THE 3rd vs. CAT'S EYE in 2023. He was Aoshi Shinomori in Rurouni Kenshin from 1996 and was still Aoshi for the New Kyoto Arc films in 2011 and 2012. Japanese voice work rewards that sort of continuity in a way almost no other performing job does.

Outside anime he is one of the standard Japanese dubbing voices for a shelf of American actors, Bill Murray, Gary Oldman, Kevin Bacon, Kurt Russell and Bob Odenkirk among them, and he was among the earliest Japanese voices for Mel Gibson and Robin Williams. He is still working: Great Pretender in 2020, The Deer King in 2021, LUPIN ZERO in 2022, Witch Hat Atelier dated 2026.