Akio Nojima

Akio Nojima was born in 1945 in Fushun, in what was then Japanese-occupied Manchuria. By the account in his own biography his father, drafted into the army, was killed in action within weeks of the birth and a month before the war ended, and his mother brought him and his older sister back to Tokyo. He has worked in Japanese voice acting for well over half a century, first with the Tokyo Actor's Consumer's Cooperative Society and, by 2016, with Sigma Seven. The profession runs in the family: his sons Hirofumi and Kenji are both voice actors.

Read his credits in a column and the casting logic is obvious. He is the voice you hire for men with rank. A Japanese delegate in The Castle of Cagliostro, a colonel in Queen Millennia, a captain in Mission Outer Space Srungle, a correspondence soldier, a father, a narrator. The register is authority without menace: measured, faintly dry, the voice of somebody who has already read the report you are about to deliver. It is why he lands the kindly older men in gentle shows as easily as the officers in mecha.

Abroad he is best known for two roles that are not among the credits listed here, Saga in Saint Seiya and the Japanese voice of KITT in Knight Rider. What this list does show is durability: television work from the late 1960s through to features in the 2010s, which in that industry is rarer than any single famous part.