Noriko Ohara, the Japanese voice actress who for decades played the role of Nobita on the beloved children’s show “Doraemon,” giving life to a main character on one of the country’s longest-running television shows, has died. She was 88.
Her agency, 81 Produce, said in a statement on Tuesday that she died on July 12 after unsuccessful treatment for an unspecified illness. The statement did not say where she died.
“Doraemon,” an animated series on which the titular robot cat befriends Nobita, a 10-year-old boy struggling at school, is considered a staple in Japan, and Ms. Ohara’s voice was widely recognizable. She played Nobita from the 1970s to the early 2000s.
She also starred in other popular anime, including “Yatterman,” “Future Boy Conan” and “Heidi, Girl of the Alps,” as well as Japanese-dubbed versions of Western films. Her work won her multiple awards in Japan, including in the Anime Grand Prix and the Seiyu Awards, given to anime voice actors.
She began voicing Nobita in 1979. The show was broadcast Mondays through Saturdays, and she was frequently required to record seven or eight episodes at a time, she said in a 2017 interview with Cinema Today, a Japanese news site.
She described it as an intense task. “Working on ‘Doraemon’ was like being an athlete,” she said. “I had to build up my stamina.”
She played the character until 2005.
Noriko Tobe was born in Tokyo on Oct. 2, 1935, according to her agency. As a child, according she said on her website, she grew up listening to her parents read or tell her stories. She also dreamed of becoming a writer like Jo March in Louisa May Alcott’s novel “Little Women” after seeing a movie adaptation.
In middle school, she said, she decided to become an actress, like June Allyson, who played Jo in the 1949 film of “Little Women.” As an adult, Ms. Ohara voiced the character in a Japanese version of the movie.
“Fifty years later, I became a voice actress and played the role of Jo,” she wrote. “Dreams come true!”
She began her career at a children’s theater company, working in puppet shows and dramas, she said in 2017. She then worked on dubbing foreign films and television dramas, many from the United States, at a time when dubbed media was new to Japan.
“I saw things I’d never seen in Japan, like garage doors opening with the flick of a remote control, or freezers and huge vacuum cleaners,” she said. “I was enjoying American culture, which is said to be 50 years ahead of Japan.”
When she dubbed foreign films, she mostly voiced mature, elegant female characters, as portrayed by such actresses as Jane Fonda, Shirley MacLaine and Catherine Deneuve. But in anime, Ms. Ohara often played boys. In “Doraemon,” her character was a lazy and carefree schoolboy.
Outside of her job as a voice actress, she performed poetry readings at universities, recorded fairy tales and offered classes to voice acting students.
Information on survivors was not immediately available.
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