Voice actor Hiroshi Tsuchida died on October 11 of heart failure. He was 54. His agency, 81 Produce, announced the death on Tuesday and said the funeral was held privately for family members only, at the family’s request.
Tsuchida was born in Tokyo in February 1972 and grew up wanting to act. He graduated from Tokyo Metropolitan Bunkyo High School and trained for two years with the Touhai theater company. An injury left him considering a different path, and he joined the talent agency Big Apple instead of continuing on stage. His acting debut came in 1994 as Saizo, the Ninja Blue ranger in Ninja Sentai Kakuranger. From the late 1990s he worked mainly as a voice actor and narrator.
Western viewers know him best as Grisha Yeager in Attack on Titan, the father whose decisions set the entire story in motion. He played Daikichi Kawachi in Usagi Drop, the thirty-year-old bachelor who suddenly becomes a parent to a six-year-old. Those two roles sit at opposite ends of what he could do: one is a man keeping secrets, the other is a man with nothing to hide.
The roles people will name first
His credits run across three decades of anime. He was Keigo Oonishi in Texhnolyze, Ganesha in Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?, John Titor in Steins;Gate, and Raidou Namiashi in Naruto. He voiced HANE2 in Ultraman Decker, which put him in front of a tokusatsu audience again nearly thirty years after Kakuranger.
At the time of his death he was in the middle of two roles: Timothy Britts in Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation Season 3, and Lionel in The Seven Knights of the Marronnier Kingdom, which is airing this season.
Outside anime
He voiced Feng Wei in the Tekken series and Kazuki in the Yakuza games. In Japanese dubbing he was a regular for Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Scott Adkins, and he voiced Lightning McQueen in the Cars films, Kraglin in the Guardians of the Galaxy series, and Donatello in the 2012 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon.
Dubbing is where a lot of Japanese voice actors build range without most fans noticing. Matching a live-action performance is a different craft from voicing an animated character, and Tsuchida did enough of it that he ended up as the Japanese voice of two Hollywood actors.
Two roles still running
The Seven Knights of the Marronnier Kingdom is airing now, and Mushoku Tensei‘s third season is in production. Both will have to deal with a performance that stopped partway through. Studios rarely say much about how they handle this, and nothing has been announced about recasting.
Mushoku Tensei Season 3 Part 2 is already confirmed for 2027, so his work in that series will not end with this broadcast.
Tsuchida was 54. The news comes in a difficult week for the industry: on Monday, Visual Arts/Key announced that writer and composer Jun Maeda, 51, has pharyngeal cancer and has chosen palliative care.
What he leaves behind
A career that started with a kids’ superhero show and ended with a supporting role in one of the biggest isekai franchises running is not the obvious arc, but it is the honest one. Tsuchida was rarely the lead. He was the father, the boss, the informant, the guy with one scene who made it land.
Grisha Yeager is the clearest example. He appears in a handful of episodes and is discussed in nearly all of them, and the reason the character holds is that Tsuchida played him as a man who is frightened rather than cruel. That reading is what makes the basement reveal work at all. The franchise keeps growing elsewhere, but that scene is the one people quote.
His family asked for privacy, and the funeral has already taken place.
Source: MyAnimeList News, citing Oricon News and Senkai News
Featured image: Hiroshi Tsuchida, via MyAnimeList News.
