Koichi Yamadera, the voice of everyone, now fighting to keep his own

Koichi Yamadera

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	June 17, 1961 Shiogama, Miyagi, Japan
Occupation	Voice actor
Known for	Kiki's Delivery Service, Ghost in the Shell, Dragon Ball Super: Broly
Awards	Galaxy · 2 Seiyu Awards · Famitsu Awards · Japan Movie Critics Awards

Casting directors in Tokyo have a shorthand for the part nobody can quite settle: when in doubt, call Yamadera. That reflex has made Koichi Yamadera the Japanese voice of Will Smith, Eddie Murphy and Jim Carrey, of Donald Duck and the Genie, of the bounty hunter Spike Spiegel and of Beerus, the bored, cat-eared god of destruction in Dragon Ball. In Japan he is known as the man with the seven-coloured voice. The better he does the job, the less any single role sounds like the man doing it, and that is both the craft and its trap.

The question hanging over him now is who owns the instrument. In Dragon Ball Super: Beerus, the rebuilt version of the series that began on Fuji TV and Crunchyroll this month, Beerus speaks in takes Yamadera recorded for the original series years ago, re-cut around new animation. He has said he was surprised to hear no new dialogue would be recorded, and called it a stroke of luck: “They’re taking what we recorded back then and building something new out of it.” With his consent, that is a remaster. Without it, it is what he and some two dozen colleagues went public against with the campaign NOMORE Mudan Seisei AI, a protest at readings, songs and voices themselves being posted online, and sometimes sold, by people who never stood in a booth.

The road to that booth ran through a university rakugo club. Yamadera grew up in Tagajō and Rifu, a few kilometres from the Miyagi port of Shiogama where he was born on June 17, 1961, the son of a Self-Defense Forces serviceman, doing impressions of the villains from Kamen Rider for anyone who would listen. At Tagajō High School he managed the basketball team, which mostly meant shouting. At Tohoku Gakuin University, studying commerce, he ran the comic-storytelling society under the stage name Hanareya Bunkō, and he still describes that club as the origin of everything. He had an offer from an advertising agency when he picked up a book in the campus co-op called How to Become a Voice Actor. At 22 he moved to Tokyo and enrolled in the training school of the actors’ cooperative Haikyō.

The debut came in 1985 as a motorcycle-riding friend in the video anime Megazone 23, followed by a first television regular, an otter in Bosco Adventure. Dubbing arrived by accident, after a party piece he performed at a senior colleague’s wedding caught the right ears; his first lead dub was Young Sherlock Holmes in 1988. The same year he started voicing the dog Cheese in Soreike! Anpanman, and he still does. In 1989 Ranma ½ gave him two parts at once, the hopelessly lost rival Ryōga Hibiki and the Jusenkyō guide, an early sign of how the industry would come to use him.

The 1990s fixed the image. He was the double-dealing agent Ryōji Kaji in Neon Genesis Evangelion, then Spike Spiegel in Shinichirō Watanabe’s Cowboy Bebop, the role that carried his name to anime audiences abroad, and later the investigator Togusa in Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. From 1997 he also hosted the TV Tokyo children’s show Oha Suta, every weekday morning for eighteen and a half years, until he stepped down in 2016 saying it was time to hand it to a younger generation. Meanwhile he became the official Japanese voice of Will Smith, with Smith’s blessing; in 2019, during a Tokyo interview, Smith asked him to dub him live, on the spot.

The 2010s were about inheritance. In 2011 he took over Inspector Zenigata in Lupin III from Gorō Naya, who had played the part for four decades. He became the Gamilas leader Desler in Space Battleship Yamato 2199 and originated the voice of Beerus in the 2013 film Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods, carrying him into Dragon Ball Super. For The Last of Us he voiced Joel and won the Famitsu Award for character voice; in Danganronpa V3 he played all five Monokuma cubs, the girl included. When TV Asahi polled working voice actors on the most remarkable person in their trade, in 2011 and again in 2017, they put him first.

The reputation for genius is the part he disputes. Yamadera says he is not one, that he has spent his career stealing from seniors he admired, and he names Michio Hazama as the master he is still trying to catch. He calls live-action acting a weak spot, even after a Galaxy Award for Kōki Mitani’s drama Aikotoba wa Yūki, because on screen he feels he is floating. He has also said that the late-night anime aimed at hardcore fans rarely books him; his work leans to children and families. In a 2016 interview he admitted searching the internet for praise of an impression and finding a verdict instead: Yama-chan scores about sixty at everything, never a zero, never a hundred. It is the sharpest critique of his career, and it came from an anonymous commenter. Range made him the safe call. “When in doubt” is not the same as being the only possible choice.

His recent moves read like an answer to that. In 2022 he pitched, for the first time, a Japanese dub of a foreign production he loved, Only Murders in the Building, voiced Martin Short‘s Oliver himself and helped cast the rest. After turning sixty he began formal voice training for the first time, so that audiences of long-running shows would not hear a tired version of the characters they grew up with. In 2021 he married the radio personality Robin Shoko Okada; earlier marriages to the voice actresses Mika Kanai and Rie Tanaka ended in divorce.

The workload has not thinned. In 2025 he reunited with Watanabe on Lazarus, as Dr. Skinner, the Nobel-winning scientist behind a miracle drug with a lethal catch. The same autumn he became the talking belt buckle of Kamen Rider ZEZTZ. This summer he voiced the monster Gumi in the Japanese release of Minions & Monsters, and in February his childhood city of Tagajō named him one of its ambassadors. The Dragon Ball rebuild had its world premiere screening at New York Comic Con before reaching Japanese television on October 11.

Next comes a farewell of sorts. On October 30, Japanese cinemas open Be Forever Yamato: Rebel 3199 Chapter 7, the last instalment of the remake cycle, with Yamadera back as Desler. Those lines are new, spoken in a booth by the man himself, which is the arrangement he has spent the last two years defending.