Four Gokus, One Table: Dragon Ball’s Voices Meet in Houston for the First Time
For forty years, Goku has sounded different depending on where you grew up. This weekend in Houston, four of those voices sat at the same table for the first time: Masako Nozawa from Japan, Mario Castañeda from Mexico, Sean Schemmel from the United States and Ankur Javeri from India. It’s a fan moment, and it’s also a reminder of what dubbing actors really are to an audience.
The meeting happened around Tokyo X 2026, a Japanese culture festival running Saturday and Sunday, September 26 and 27, at the Reliant Center in NRG Park. The organizers billed it as the first time all four performers had appeared at the same event in the same place, timed to celebrate 40 years of the “Dragon Ball” anime and Nozawa’s 90th birthday.
The four shared a dinner before the doors opened. On Saturday morning Nozawa and Castañeda cut the ribbon together to open the festival, according to Mexico’s El Universal, and all four were scheduled to meet fans over the weekend.
“A dream come true”
Castañeda, 64, has voiced Goku for Latin American audiences for roughly three decades. He didn’t play it cool. “Everything starts with a dream…!!! Yesterday, a dream came true…!” he wrote on Instagram, thanking Nozawa, the festival and his two fellow Gokus, in a post first picked up by Infobae.
The photos show the Mexican actor and the Japanese actress doing the Kamehameha pose side by side, which is about as close to a sacred image as the franchise has.
Javeri, the Hindi voice, called it a historic and epic night on Instagram. He thanked Indian anime fans, and fans around the world, who had wished for years that the four could meet, and wished Nozawa a happy 90th.
- Masako Nozawa, Japanese. The original. She also voices Goku’s sons Gohan and Goten and his father Bardock, plus classics like Kitaro in “GeGeGe no Kitaro” and Tetsuro in “Galaxy Express 999.”
- Mario Castañeda, Latin American Spanish. Also the Spanish voice of Bruce Banner in the Marvel films, of Jim Carrey in “The Grinch” and of Dr. Robotnik in the “Sonic” movies.
- Sean Schemmel, English. The voice of Goku for English-speaking fans in the United States.
- Ankur Javeri, Hindi. The voice of Goku for India’s audience.
Why a festival builds its weekend around dubbing actors
Tokyo X expected more than 25,000 visitors and more than 600 vendors and exhibitors, with samurai armor, show cars, taiko drumming and a concert on the program. The headline, though, was four people whose faces most fans wouldn’t have recognised twenty years ago.
Naoki Yoshida, the festival’s founder, explained the thinking in the announcement. “Having four of the voices behind a character as globally recognized as Goku together at Tokyo X represents that mission in a very special way,” he said.
VoiceEditSuiteTrim it, clean it, deliver it. One pass.He went further. “Anime has connected generations of people across languages and cultures, and we’re excited to give fans an opportunity to experience a moment that has never happened before,” Yoshida said in the release published by Anime News Network.
One character, four performances
Here’s the part working voice actors should notice. None of the four is doing an impression of the others. Nozawa’s Goku is bright and boyish, a woman’s voice playing a boy who grows into a man. Castañeda’s is warmer and more grown up, the Goku a generation of Latin American kids heard after school. Schemmel’s leans into the heroic shout. Each version became “the real one” for millions of people, because that’s the one they heard first.
That’s the quiet argument for human dubbing that no marketing line can make as well. Audiences don’t bond with a translation. They bond with a performance, and they stay loyal to the performer for decades. When Castañeda turns up as Bruce Banner or the Grinch, Latin American audiences hear an old friend.
It’s also why dubbing actors have become convention headliners in their own right. For many fans outside Japan, the dub is the show. Meeting the person who gave a character its voice in your language feels like meeting the character.
A birthday worth the trip
This weekend was Nozawa’s first appearance in Texas, according to Infobae. She has played Goku since the anime began in 1986, and at 90 she’s still the voice Japanese fans hear. The festival programmed a celebration of her career and of the franchise, and a question and answer session with the four actors.
For the actors in the room, it was a chance to meet the colleagues who had spent their careers on the same character without ever sharing a booth. For everyone else, it was a picture worth keeping: four Gokus, four languages, and every one of them the right one.
Sources: Infobae (September 26, 2026); El Universal (September 26, 2026); El Comercio, Peru (September 26, 2026); Tokyo X press release via Anime News Network (September 10, 2026). Quotations from Spanish sources are translated by Voice Over Herald.
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