Sumi Shimamoto

If you grew up on Studio Ghibli, you already know Sumi Shimamoto's voice even if you never learned her name. Clarisse in The Castle of Cagliostro, the title role in Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, the mother in My Neighbor Totoro, and work in Princess Mononoke. That is an absurd run for one performer. What makes her extraordinary is not the sweetness people remember first, though. It is that the sweetness has steel inside it. Nausicaa does not work if the voice is only gentle; the character has to be able to walk straight toward danger, and you can hear that decision being made in the line readings. Then she turns around and plays somebody's mother, and it lands as the same human being, simply grown up. She received the Kazue Takahashi Award in 2017, but the plainer proof is that decades later people can still quote her lines from memory.

This take was written by generative AI, one per person, from publicly reported facts (editorial policy). It is a reading of the record, not reporting.

Name (English)

Sumi Shimamoto

Name (Japanese)

島本須美

Reading

しまもと すみ

Born

December 8, 1954 (age 71)

Origin

Kōchi-shi, Kōchi Prefecture, Japan

Occupation

seiyū / actor

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Sagittarius / Horse

Blood type

A

Measurements

80 / 59 / 83

Agency

Freelance

Awards & achievements

• 2017 Kazue Takahashi Award

Works summary

Appearances

552

By year (titles with a known year)

1977: 7, 1978: 6, 1979: 4, 1980: 4, 1981: 2, 1982: 2, 1983: 1, 1984: 3, 1985: 3, 1986: 5, 1987: 4, 1988: 3, 1989: 2, 1990: 2, 1991: 2, 1992: 1, 1993: 1, 1994: 2, 1996: 1, 1997: 2, 2000: 1, 2003: 1, 2005: 4, 2006: 1, 2007: 1, 2008: 1, 2009: 2, 2010: 2, 2012: 3, 2013: 1, 2014: 1, 2015: 1, 2016: 1, 2017: 4, 2018: 5, 2019: 1, 2020: 1, 2021: 1, 2022: 7, 2023: 2, 2025: 3, 2026: 1, year unknown: 450

Filmography / notable works

• Wikipedia (English)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumi%20Shimamoto
• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%B3%B6%E6%9C%AC%E9%A0%88%E7%BE%8E
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q584626

Tags

• Kōchi Prefecture
• seiyū
• actor

Last updated

November 2, 2026

Only publicly available facts are listed; non-public or unconfirmed items are omitted. Base data was compiled from Wikidata from June 2026 onward; ages are recalculated daily and deaths are checked against Wikidata on an ongoing basis. Works and profile fields sourced from Wikipedia reflect content as of 2026-08-26. English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.