Junko Iwao

Junko Iwao is a singer as much as a voice actress, born in Beppu, Oita in 1970, and Japanese animation kept handing her characters whose voice is the whole of their identity. The sharpest case is Mima Kirigoe in Perfect Blue, a pop idol who leaves her group to become an actress and loses her grip on which version of herself is real. Iwao plays her small, polite and accommodating, which is precisely why the fractures land.

Her most-heard role runs the other way. Tomoyo Daidouji in Cardcaptor Sakura is the best friend with the camcorder: endlessly devoted, endlessly composed, and almost entirely a matter of vocal placement, since the character does very little and needs to be adored anyway. Iwao carried her through the television series, two theatrical films and the Clear Card revival two decades later.

Around those two she assembled one of the deeper resumes of 1990s anime. Hikari Horaki across the Neon Genesis Evangelion series and the film cycles that followed, the title role in Key the Metal Idol, Kotori in X, Serika in To Heart, Ceres in Ceres, Celestial Legend, and Kikyo in Hunter x Hunter, which is not among the credits listed here. Her game work includes Pai Chan in Virtua Fighter and Mint in Tales of Phantasia. Later credits thin into supporting adults, the mothers and teachers of Puella Magi Madoka Magica and the Chunibyo films, which is the ordinary arc for a voice actress who started young.