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.

Name (English)

Sumi Shimamoto

Name (Japanese)

島本須美

Born

December 8, 1954 (age 71)

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Sagittarius / Horse

Origin

Kōchi-shi, Kōchi Prefecture, Japan

Occupation

seiyū / actor

Awards & achievements

• 2017 Kazue Takahashi Award

Motto

Private

• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%B3%B6%E6%9C%AC%E9%A0%88%E7%BE%8E

Tags

• Kōchi Prefecture
• seiyū
• actor

Last updated

2026-07-26

Facts are limited to publicly available information up to 2024; non-public or unconfirmed items are omitted. English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.