Junko Takeuchi

Junko Takeuchi, born in 1972, works in a corner of Japanese voice acting with its own long tradition: adult women voicing boys. It is not a novelty. A woman's voice can hold a boyish pitch for a fourteen-hour recording week and across fifteen years of a series without breaking, which is exactly what her most famous job required.

She has voiced Naruto Uzumaki since the series began in 2002, through Naruto: Shippuden, more than a dozen feature films and Boruto: Naruto Next Generations, aging a character from a loud, ignored child into a father while keeping the same throat. The performance is louder and rougher than most leads, all scraped edges and cracked shouting, and the show's emotional register depends on how far she is willing to push it. Very few actors anywhere have carried a single role at that volume for that long.

The rest of the career runs on the same instrument with different settings. Gon Freecss in the 1999 Hunter x Hunter is Naruto's more cheerful cousin, Takuya Kanbara in Digimon Frontier and Mamoru Endou in Inazuma Eleven are earnest sports-and-adventure boys, Metabee in Medabots is a rude robot, and Rin Natsuki became Cure Rouge in Yes! PreCure 5. Elsewhere she plays Mokuba Kaiba in Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters, Gomamon in Digimon: Digital Monsters, Dieter in Monster and Mimi in Children Who Chase Lost Voices. She has also dubbed MrBeast into Japanese, which is its own kind of career milestone.