Masako Nozawa, Goku’s voice for 40 years, is still fighting over who owns it

Masako Nozawa

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	October 25, 1936 Arakawa, Tokyo, Japan
Occupation	Voice actress
Known for	Dragon Ball Super: Broly, Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero, Weathering with You
Awards	Person of Cultural Merit · Kikuchi Kan Prize · Mainichi Art Award, Special Prize · Japan Academy Film Prize · Seiyu Awards, Achievement · Guinness World Records: longest video game voice acting career

Somewhere online right now, Son Goku is singing a song he never recorded. The voice is a copy, stitched together by software from decades of shouting and laughing into Toei Animation’s microphones, and the woman it was copied from has said exactly what she thinks of it. Masako Nozawa told NHK she cannot forgive anyone using her voice without asking. “Without heart, it’s no good, whatever the role,” she said. “Even a voice that’s only crying is different when you cry with real feeling.”

That argument, over who a voice belongs to, runs through her whole working life. Nozawa is the Japanese voice of Goku, of his sons Gohan and Goten, and of his father Bardock, a family she has voiced on her own since Dragon Ball reached television. Before that she was Kitarō, the one-eyed ghost boy, and Tetsurō Hoshino, the boy riding Leiji Matsumoto’s space train, and for a stretch she was Doraemon. Few performers anywhere have spent so long being a boy, and fewer still are about to turn ninety with a new Goku series on the air every Sunday.

The painter Ryoshu Nozawa, a leading pupil of the Nihonga master Kawai Gyokudō, had one child: Masako, born in the Nippori district of Tokyo’s Arakawa ward in October 1936. An aunt, the Shochiku film actress Kiyono Sasaki, put her in front of a camera at three. Evacuated to Numata, in Gunma, during the war, she was applying to high school when she saw her family register and learned that Tsuru, the woman who had raised her, was not her birth mother. Her answer, repeated in an interview decades later, was that there had never been any other mother for her.

Theater came first. As a junior high school student she joined the Tougei company, and in her late teens she started dubbing to keep the troupe solvent. Television was young, foreign dramas were dubbed live, real children could not be trusted with a live microphone and grown men’s voices had long since broken, so producers turned to women. Her first part, at 19, was an Indian boy in an imported film. Once staff knew she could do a boy, they kept calling.

Anime arrived with Wolf Boy Ken and a guest spot on Astro Boy in 1963. Her first lead, Kitarō in GeGeGe no Kitarō in 1968, came at the request of the manga’s creator, Shigeru Mizuki; Matsumoto himself chose her for Tetsurō in Galaxy Express 999 a decade later. In 1973 she took over the title role of the first Doraemon series from Kōsei Tomita. The turn that defined her came out of a rejection. Fuji TV kept an unwritten rule that one actor could not carry two leads at once, so she was not brought back for the 1985 Kitarō, which left her free to audition for Dragon Ball. Akira Toriyama, who knew little about voice actors, picked her from a tape with the names taken off. He later said he heard her voice in his head while drawing.

Part of Goku is her invention. “Ossu! Ora Goku!”, the greeting every fan of the anime can imitate, began as an ad-lib to make the staff laugh, and she has noted, drily, that Toei Animation ended up with the credit. When father and sons share a scene in Dragon Ball Z and its sequels, she records all three in a single take, switching voices on the spot; her colleague Toshio Furukawa says nobody else can do it, and younger actors once asked her to stop because it made the job look easy. She prepares no voice before an audition and watches each episode twice, first as a fan and then as her own critic.

The comfortable version of Nozawa is the beloved grandmother of Japanese animation, decorated and smiling. It leaves out how combative she has been. She led 361 voice actors in a lawsuit against Nippon Animation and its recording subsidiary Onkyo Eizo over royalties never paid when old series were sold on video. A district court in 2003 ordered Onkyo Eizo to pay 87 million yen but cleared Nippon Animation; the Tokyo High Court found both companies liable in 2004, and the Supreme Court let that stand the following year. She has been just as blunt about her own trade. In 2016 she said young actors had become interchangeable, all reaching for the same “cute girl” voice, and she blamed the schools.

Her stand on AI is also less simple than the headlines make it. In 2024 her agency, Aoni Production, signed with the platform CoeFont to build synthetic voices from the recordings of ten of its actors, Nozawa among them, for virtual assistants and medical devices, with acting work explicitly ruled out. What she objects to now is the missing permission, the same principle the Japan Actors Union, where she is vice-chair, is trying to fix in consent guidelines. A licensed voice inside a hospital device and an unlicensed Goku reading memes are, in her account, different acts, and the fan clips sit on the wrong side of that line.

Official Japan caught up late. In 2017 Guinness World Records counted her years as Goku in video games as the longest voice acting career in the medium. She became the first voice actor to receive the Kikuchi Kan Prize in 2023, in its 71st year, and in October 2025 the government named her a Person of Cultural Merit, a first for her profession. At the spring garden party in the Akasaka imperial gardens in April 2026, the Emperor told her he had watched GeGeGe no Kitarō on television as a child.

She was married to the voice actor Masaaki Tsukada until his death in 2014; they had a daughter. She still runs her own stage company, Gekidan Moonlight.

The work keeps coming. Dragon Ball Super: Beerus, a reworked edition of the series that first aired between 2015 and 2018, began on Fuji TV on October 11, 2026, with Nozawa as Goku and Goten, two years after Dragon Ball Daima. When a new series starts, she said in the launch interview, her reaction is simply “Yes!”, because she is already thinking like Goku. Dragon Ball Super: The Galactic Patrol, announced at the franchise’s 40th-anniversary event in January, is in production. She turns 90 on October 25. After the Kikuchi Kan Prize she said she meant to keep voice acting for another hundred years, and her quarrel with the clones comes down to a simple demand: as long as the original is still at the microphone, nobody gets to borrow her voice without asking.