Kikunosuke Toya: Having Worked His Way onto the Scene Through a Variety of Roles, He Is Now Ready to Soar to the Next Level [Part 1 of 2]

Kikunosuke Toya

Born: Nov. 30, 1998
Height: 175 centimeters
Notable skills: Playing jazz piano and the trombone, and memorizing text and music.
In October 2017, he won a special award in the sixth “Anistoteles,” a voice actor audition held by SMA. He came to the attention of anime fans with his role as Denji, the hero in the “Chainsaw Man” TV anime series.

“I always loved doing things that made me stand out in public”

Voice actor Kikunosuke Toya has a strong yet cool and youthful voice that resembles someone in a period between childhood and young adulthood. His pleasant smile exudes his charming personality. An SMA voice actor, Toya garnered fame for his role as Denji, the hero of the 2022 hit anime series “Chainsaw Man.”

This year, he demonstrated his singing and dancing skills in his role as Akira Kiyose, a boy with ambition to become a pop music idol in Sony Music Group's multidimensional idol project called “UniteUp!” He is regarded as a top next-generation voice actor who has been cast in key roles in two major anime series to be aired on TV this coming fall, namely: the role of Donny in “The Seven Deadly Sins: Four Knights of the Apocalypse” and Mikoto Yuzuki in “The Yuzuki Family's Four Sons.”

Toya, who was born on Nov. 25, 1998, said he lived in Thailand between the ages of two and seven, due to his father’s work in the country.

“A cool way of describing it would be that I am a returnee, I guess, but I am no linguist,” he said. “I returned to Japan when I was in the second grade of elementary school. Looking back, I regret not learning more about Thailand’s culture and language since I was given such a precious opportunity to live there (laughs).”

What sent Toya, now counted among Japan’s leading voice actors after his notable performance in “Chainsaw Man,” off to his successful career was the 2017 Sixth “Anistoteles,” a voice actor audition held by SMA. Not only was he selected among 12 finalists from a total of 7,203 applicants, but he also received a special award. This remarkable result is a testament to the star quality he already possessed at this point.

“Perhaps because I am the youngest son, I always liked doing things that stood out in front of people,” he said. “I began piano lessons at age three, when we were living in Thailand. I continued taking piano lessons until I was around 20, motivated mainly by my love of music, although I wasn't good enough to enter any competitions.”

Toya said one of the reasons he continued playing the piano for so long was that it was a skill that made him stand out.

“Part of it was simply the fun of playing it,” he said. “When you could play piano in junior high, you would be asked to accompany a chorus in choir competitions. And that position makes you an instant hero (laughs). Friends would praise me, like, ‘Wow, you’re amazing!’ And that made me happy. I wasn’t too serious about practicing, and I knew that I didn’t have talent, but I liked the teacher and that was another major reason I kept going (laughs).

So in high school, I began learning songs covered and posted on YouTube and Nico Nico Douga by ear and then gradually shifted to playing game music and anime songs rather than classical music. I guess I was able to continue playing the piano because it gave me the joy of learning to play the songs I liked. In high school, I played keyboards in an all-boy band covering [all-female Japanese rock band] Princess Princess.”

Forming a comedy duo with a friend, and performing a baseball-themed skit in the school festival

As he regarded piano as just one of his hobbies, Toya never really had the ambition of entering a music academy or becoming a professional musician. In fact, he had dreamed of becoming a comedian since he was small.

“I began to dream of becoming a comedian when I was a junior high school student. Television gave me the initial impact,” he said. “As I watched comedy programs, I noticed comedians were not just making people laugh. They looked like they were having a blast doing their job. I loved making people laugh, so I began to think what a wonderful job it is, and it became a dream of mine.”

Asked who his favorite comedian is, Toya was quick to name Bakarhythm. According to Toya, “Unidentified Fantastic Idol”, a sitcom on TV Tokyo staring Bakarhythm, Gekidan Hitori, TOKYO03, and Akari Hayami, was particularly special to him. After he entered senior high school, his passion for comedy and the ambition to become a comedian grew stronger.

“Just wishing to become a comedian would get me nowhere. I knew I had to do something for my dream, so I decided to form an after-school comedy club at my high school,” he said. “When I consulted a teacher about it, I was told that a club had to have some kind of achievements before being recognized, like participating in an external competition or performing in the school festival. So I said, ‘Why don’t we do a comedy duo at the school festival?’ and formed a duo with a friend, with me performing as the ‘top banana’ and my friend as the ‘second banana,’ in a baseball-themed routine. Our routine was inspired by [Japanese comedy duo] DOWNTOWN’s early routines and skits by Sandwichman [another Japanese comedy duo].”

Incidentally, SMA, his management agency, has a comedy department that has produced many popular comedy acts, including Hollywood-Zakoshisyoh, Nishikigoi, Baiking, and Koume Dayu. When this was pointed out to him, Toya said: “Yeah, you’re right. I wish they would make me an offer to do a comedy act with some of them someday!”

Returning to his high school episode, Toya’s plan to launch a comedy club unfortunately did not materialize. Instead, Toya, who was skilled on the piano, began playing the trombone.

“So I joined an after-school club where I could potentially play the piano in a big band jazz setting, because I wanted to play jazz piano in style,” he said. “The problem was, there were too many pianists. So when they had an audition [for the pianist position], I simply failed (laughs). And just as I was wondering if I should quit the club, the coach came to me and said, ‘You have a mouth just right for the trombone. You should try it.’ Trombone and trumpet are difficult instruments to learn because of the difficulty of using the mouthpiece. But I was actually pretty good at playing them from the get-go. All first-year students that joined the club with me were beginners and we encouraged each other and remained in the club for the next three years.”

His skill on the trombone, which he developed in the club, is demonstrated on his official “TOYA JAZZ KIKU JAZZ” YouTube channel. The channel features videos of him performing jazz standards and jazz arrangements of anime theme songs performed with Calmera, a Japanese jazz group. The channel surprised fans who knew of Toya only as a voice actor. Viewers have included those who played trombone in high school brass bands, just as Toya did.

“I continued to play trombone after graduating from high school, but little did I know that I would be playing it with professional musicians. I’m just as surprised too! (laughs) Because I play the trombone, I got to be cast in the role of a character that plays the trombone in a brass band-themed game called ‘Wind Boys!’ I was glad I had learned to play the instrument.”

So far in this interview Toya has talked about music and comedy, his hobbies before becoming a voice actor. Now, was he familiar with acting, which can have a major impact on the job of a voice actor?

“I began to be seriously interested in acting fairly late,” he said. “The first time was when I was a second-year high school student. Actually, I had a degree of interest in joining the drama club when I entered high school, and I actually did so on a trial basis. The relationships I established in that period led to an opportunity to play a guest role for the club when it participated in a high-school drama competition. This experience made me realize the joy of acting. The definitive opportunity came in the high school festival in my third year. When our class decided to do a play, it excited the performer within me. So I volunteered to write the script. Typically, third-year students are busy studying for college entrance exams, you know? So no other students wanted to star in the play and I ended up taking the lead role, writing the script and doing the production. And that’s when I learned the fun of doing all these things.”

Toya played the lead role, wrote the script and produced the performance. So what was the production like?

“It was perhaps like ‘High School Musical,’ an American production. As I wanted to do comedy, it included plenty of comedic elements. It had a classic storyline where trouble-filled incidents lead to a happy ending, and I included lots of funny elements in each scene. I think I can still find the script and video somewhere if I looked for them.”

Improvisation draws wild laughter at an audition

Toya said in high school he loved to perform in public whenever there was a chance, be it in the brass band, a comedy act or in a stage performance. Thanks to the experiences of those days, he “rarely feel[s] nervous being in front of people even today.”

After having a lively high school life, Toya finally began taking action toward his dream after graduation. His dream at this point, of course, was becoming a comedian.

“So initially, I wanted to be a comedian and went to auditions held by various talent agencies, both big and small, and at the same time I continued to learn as much as I could from the net,” Toya said. “But I didn’t pass any of them. So I began going to auditions for general TV entertainers, in addition to the comedian auditions.

During this period, I did a short skit at an audition and did a lot of improvisation. And this drew wild laughter. By this point, I had no serious acting experience. I had only scratched the surface in high school. So this experience made me realize how much fun acting is. So after this experience, I began to go to actor and voice-actor auditions.”

Toya said, at this point, “I wanted to do anything related to acting and, most of all, I wanted to be hired by an agency.” He had a strong urge to perform in front of people.

“Although I had been playing the piano since I was small, and played music and performed comedy acts and acted on stage in school, I knew, of course, that I had never been serious in any of them,” Toya said. “But I wanted to take on the challenge. It was around this time that I took part in the ‘Anistoteles’ audition, which led me to do the job I’m doing now.”

SMA’s “Anistoteles” requires that applicants “love anime.” It was aimed at discovering new talent in wide-ranging fields, including anime voice actors, voice-acting artists, anime song singers, actors, and general TV entertainers.

“I still wasn’t pro, so I thought this audition presented a big chance because it was operated by Sony Music, which everybody knows,” he said. “I loved watching anime, and I also loved anime songs. So I decided I had no choice but to apply for it, which I did.”

What made Toya watch anime avidly, he said, was “The Melancholy Of Haruhi Suzumiya,” an anime series that ignited a late-night TV anime boom in Japan.

“It was ‘Haruhi’ that led me to watch late-night anime,” he said. “After that, I became totally hooked on ‘Re:ZERO’ [Re:ZERO -Starting Life in Another World]. It just blew my mind. So I began watching every episode on the weekly broadcast. I sought after other TV and radio programs featuring voice actors who appeared in ‘Re:ZERO,’ as well as searched for other related media. Then I began to watch other anime titles. Actually, one of the reasons I decided to take the ‘Anistoteles’ audition was that Inori Minase, the voice actor who played the role of Rem in ‘Re:ZERO,’ had won the grand prize in it.”

Toya was attracted to doing voice acting as a job because he found it similar to acting in dramas, but he had only a vague idea of what voice acting was all about at this point. But “when I passed the first screening round, which was based only on the documents submitted by the applicants, and then the second round, based on interviews, I became serious. I thought, ‘This could be my major breakthrough!’

One of the things they required was to say a line from an anime title. So I practiced imitating voice actors who I thought were great models for my acting and studied anime very closely before taking the audition,” he said.

“So, in the audition, I did a line by Jotaro Kujo in ‘JoJo's Bizarre Adventure’ which I was watching intently at the time. I later realized the voice actor for Jotaro Kujo was Daisuke Ono. Ono-san played the role of Itsuki Koizumi in ‘The Melancholy Of Haruhi Suzumiya,’ so, although I feel a little presumptuous to say this, I thought our fates crossed. I’ve never met him, so it would be great if I had the chance to do so some time in the future.”

（To be continued to Part 2）

Text by Mika Abe
Photos by Osamu Hoshikawa
Translated by Atsushi Kodera