Ichiro Nagai

The Man Who Worked Himself to Death

Ichiro Nagai died alone in a hotel bathtub in Hiroshima on January 27, 2014. He was 82 years old. He had traveled there to record the narration for an ABC program, and his heart stopped after the workday ended.

His life was exactly that: a constant flow of words in front of a microphone that stopped only for biological reasons. In 1931 he was born in Osaka, and although he studied literature at Ritsumeikan University, his destiny lay on the theater stage.

But postwar Japan needed voices for the emerging television industry. Nagai soon understood that his ability to modulate tone would let him earn a better living than the stages of a rehearsal room. In 1963 he took part in Astro Boy, and from that point on there was not a single year of drought in his schedule.

He never sought the fame of neon billboards.

His voice occupied a mid-range that could jump from the most absurd comedy to the authority of a wise old man in a matter of seconds. Nagai didn't play characters because he preferred to build personalities from the throat up.

Four Decades of the Same Routine

In 1969 he accepted the role of Namihei Isono in the series Sazae-san. What seemed like just another seasonal job became a voluntary commitment that lasted 45 years without interruption. For Japanese audiences, his voice was the Sunday afternoon alarm clock.

He played the strict yet tender father of the family. Nagai recorded thousands of episodes without ever missing a dubbing session, and his scolding shout became a fundamental part of Japanese popular culture. But Nagai hated being typecast in a single domestic role.

That's why he pursued radically different projects at the same time.

In 1986 he voiced Master Karin in Dragon Ball. He was a hermit cat who lived in a tower and handed out magic seeds to the heroes. Nagai gave him a mix of sarcasm and wisdom that fans picked up on instantly. He was the same actor who shouted in Sazae-san, but here he sounded like a weary mystic fed up with the world.

And it worked perfectly.

He was also the narrator of the first series of Mobile Suit Gundam in 1979. His voice opened each episode with a gravity that helped sell the idea that this was not a simple cartoon about robots but a serious war drama. In that project he also played Degwin Sodo Zabi and other supporting characters to save on production costs.

The sage who didn't want to retire

Nagai was the voice of Yoda in the Japanese versions of Star Wars. He managed to adapt the inverted syntax of the Jedi master into Japanese with a naturalness that George Lucas would have approved without hesitation. In 2011 he took on the role of Isaac Netero in the remake of Hunter x Hunter.

His portrayal of Netero is remembered for the battle against the Ant King, in which Nagai had to push his vocal cords to the limit despite being over eighty years old. He recorded his final lines for this character just a few weeks before his death in Hiroshima.

But not everything was a mass-audience hit.

Nagai was a staunch defender of the labor rights of voice actors. In the 1970s he led movements to improve the rates paid by anime studios, because he considered the work exhausting and poorly paid. He didn't mind risking his own position if it meant better conditions for those who came after him.

In 2014 the series Sazae-san had to find a replacement for the first time in nearly half a century. The chosen one was Chafurin, but audiences took months to get used to the change in tone. Nagai's funeral drew hundreds of colleagues who remembered his habit of always arriving fifteen minutes before each recording.

His last credited appearance was in episode 54 of Hunter x Hunter, which aired posthumously. His death left a technical void that was difficult to fill in the Tokyo studios. The autopsy confirmed that the cause of death was ischemic heart disease suffered while he was resting after work.