Ryunosuke Kamiki, the child star Godzilla finally turned into a leading man

Ryunosuke Kamiki

Photo: Dick Thomas Johnson / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	May 19, 1993 Fujimi, Saitama, Japan
Occupation	Actor and voice actor
Known for	Spirited Away, Your Name., Howl's Moving Castle
Awards	Japan Academy Film Prize · Seiyu · Blue Ribbon

Most of the world heard Ryunosuke Kamiki long before it saw him. He was the voice of Yubaba’s giant, tantrum-prone baby in Spirited Away, and of the Tokyo schoolboy who wakes up in a stranger’s body in Your Name. Then Takashi Yamazaki put his face on screens across the world in Godzilla Minus One, as a kamikaze pilot who did not die, and audiences far from Japan matched the voice to the man.

That is the tension running through his career now. Kamiki has been working for more than three decades and spent most of them as someone’s son, someone’s younger brother, the gifted kid at the edge of the frame. The part that made him a leading man was a veteran hollowed out by survivor’s guilt. With Godzilla Minus Zero, a sequel that premiered in New York before it opens in Tokyo, he is carrying that same man into the largest release of his life.

The work began before he could choose it. Kamiki grew up in Fujimi, a commuter town in Saitama Prefecture north of Tokyo, where he was born on 19 May 1993. As a baby he fell gravely ill; he has said publicly that he was in critical condition and survived against the odds. At two, his mother enrolled him with a children’s talent agency, and a television commercial was followed by small drama parts and then leads of his own.

Hayao Miyazaki‘s Studio Ghibli gave him the other half of his career. After Boh in Spirited Away came Markl, the wizard’s young apprentice in Howl’s Moving Castle, and later Sho, the boy with a weak heart who befriends a girl a few centimetres tall in Arrietty. In between he took his first leading film role, in Takashi Miike‘s The Great Yokai War, which brought him the Japan Academy Film Prize newcomer award at twelve. Mamoru Hosoda then cast him as Kenji, the maths prodigy blamed for crashing a virtual world, in Summer Wars.

Live action kept him young well past the age when he was. He played Sojiro Seta, the swordsman who smiles because he has forgotten how to feel anything else, opposite Takeru Satoh in the Rurouni Kenshin films. At twenty-two he was a high school manga writer in Bakuman; at twenty-three, a teenage shogi professional in March Comes In Like a Lion. Makoto Shinkai‘s Your Name. became one of the biggest box-office hits in Japanese history and won him the Seiyu Award for best lead actor. In the closing stretch of Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time he became the voice of a grown-up Shinji Ikari, finally walking out of the story that had kept him fourteen.

The adult turn came in steps, some of them on paper. In 2021 he and Satoh left Amuse, the agency that had represented both since 2006, and founded their own company, Co-LaVo, keeping Amuse on as an investor rather than a manager. Two years later NHK gave him its morning serial, Ranman: 130 episodes as Mantaro Makino, a botanist modelled on Tomitaro Makino, the largely self-taught scientist who named well over a thousand plant species, in the slot much of the country watches over breakfast.

Godzilla Minus One completed the change. Koichi Shikishima turns back from his suicide mission, freezes at the trigger when Godzilla tears through an island airstrip, and comes home to a flattened Tokyo carrying both failures. Yamazaki has said the role needed an actor with the range to play a man weakened by trauma who changes over the film, and that Kamiki’s usual run of gentle parts was exactly what made him curious to try him. The film won the Academy Award for visual effects. Kamiki won the Blue Ribbon Award for best actor and was nominated for the Japan Academy Film Prize for best actor, which went to Koji Yakusho for Perfect Days.

The praise came with a caveat that is worth taking seriously. Some Western critics who admired the film called its human drama melodramatic, and Kamiki, who plays Shikishima’s guilt at full volume, sits closest to that charge. Others answered that the acting deliberately approximates Japanese studio pictures of the 1950s, the era the story inhabits. Both readings point to the real question about him: whether the open, legible emotion that made him the most dependable boy in Japanese film is a range or a single register. Early reviews of the sequel sharpen it. Hidetaka Yoshioka has more screen time, one New York review noted, but the emotional arc still belongs to Kamiki and Minami Hamabe.

He has spent the time since testing other registers. In Koki Mitani’s Fuji TV drama Pray Speak What Has Happened, which began in October 2025, he played Shogo Horai, a rookie television writer in 1984 Shibuya modelled on Mitani himself, his first part in a Mitani script. This spring brought his first appearance in Fuji’s Monday 9pm drama slot, Canned Mackerel Heads to Space, alongside its lead Takumi Kitamura, and the film Your Own Quiz, in which he is Kizuna Honjo, the quiz prodigy who answers the final question before a single word of it has been read. In September he returned to the Bayside Shakedown police franchise, 23 years after appearing in it as a child, for Bayside Shakedown N.E.W.

In February 2026 he announced through his agency that he had married a woman from outside the entertainment industry, asking the press to leave her alone. His own note promised to keep working hard at the acting he loves.

Godzilla Minus Zero, again written and directed by Yamazaki, is set in 1949, two years after the first film, with Shikishima married to Noriko and raising an adopted daughter while a new monster that grows into King Ghidorah and a regenerated Godzilla converge on Japan. After its world premiere at the New York Film Festival on 26 September, it is the Centrepiece screening of the Tokyo International Film Festival on 1 November, opens in Japan through Toho on 3 November and reaches North American screens, IMAX included, through GKIDS on 6 November. The question Yamazaki asked when he first cast Kamiki, whether the gentle boy could hold a broken man at the centre of a monster film, now gets its second and much larger answer.