Yoshimasa Hosoya's baritone sounds like a man carrying something he has decided not to mention, which is why anime keeps handing him the soldiers and the tall sportsmen who are quietly under strain. On the evidence of Attack on Titan, it is a voice worth listening for.
Fi1m perspective
Listen to Reiner Braun in the early episodes of Attack on Titan (2013). He is one of the young soldiers among the teenagers fighting man-eating giants, and Yoshimasa Hosoya gives him a low, even voice that steadies everyone around him. It is a reassuring sound. It is also, if you listen closely, a sound with something held under it, and the series will eventually tell you what. We will not.
That is what Hosoya does, and the people who cast anime know it. His work is full of burdened men: the stoic who is not as calm as he sounds, the antagonist who has reasons. Sports series in particular keep giving him the tall, physically imposing figure at the back of the team, Asahi Azumane in Haikyu (2014) among many others. The voice does a good deal of the work before the writing has to.
The career has been steady rather than sudden. He began professional voice work around 2004 or 2005 after training, and the first real notice came with the Prince of Tennis OVA series (2007), as Kuranosuke Shiraishi. Early notices on his acting were mixed, and it was a lead in Katanagatari (2010), as Shichika Yasuri, that brought wider attention for the action work. Then came Reiner, in a series we scored 83 and called superb for most of its run, and since leaving his agency to go freelance in 2014 he has worked without a pause, including a recurring part as Fumikage Tokoyami in My Hero Academia (2016).
We should own the feeling. By the fourth season of Attack on Titan we could not hear that steady voice without a small knot in the stomach, because of what the writing had done with the character by then, and because Hosoya had never once let the voice tell us in advance. That is the compliment. The caveat is that a voice this recognisable risks being asked for the same thing every time, and we have heard far less of the lighter and comic tones he is said to have.
In Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle (2025) he has a smaller part, Kaigaku, in a film we liked with reservations, and it gave us little to add. The parts keep arriving. We would like someone to hand him a comedy and find out what the baritone does when it is not carrying anything.
Biography
Yoshimasa Hosoya is a Japanese voice actor and narrator. He trained at Tokyo Announce Gakuin Performing Arts College and the Mausu Promotion Actor Training Center before joining Mausu Promotion in 2006; he has worked freelance since 2014.
He is known for roles including Reiner Braun in Attack on Titan (2013), Fumikage Tokoyami in My Hero Academia (2016), Asahi Azumane in Haikyu!! (2014) and Kaigaku in Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle (2025). He won the Seiyū Award for Best Supporting Actor in 2014 and 2016. In 2017 he took a hiatus for throat treatment before returning to work in August that year.
