Goku’s Voice Is Riding Around Japan on a Truck. Masako Nozawa Turns 90 Two Weeks After Dragon Ball Super: Beerus Begins

Dragon Ball Super: Beerus starts on Fuji TV on Sunday, October 11, and the campaign leading up to it is built on one voice. Trucks rolling through Japanese cities play narration by Masako Nozawa, who has voiced Goku since 1986. Two weeks after the premiere, on October 25, she turns 90.

The “Super Opening” advertising push started on October 5 in five Japanese cities and in New York and Los Angeles. In Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya and Sapporo, ad trucks wrapped in the new key art drive the streets while Nozawa’s narration plays from the speakers. The Fukuoka truck runs silent.

It’s a fitting way to sell the show. Dragon Ball Super: Beerus is the Dragon Ball Super anime rebuilt from the ground up, and Nozawa is still the one doing the talking.

A truck that talks like Goku

The Tokyo campaign goes further than a wrapped trailer. One special see-through truck carries a real standing figure of Goku, modelled on the show’s first key visual, so the two sides of the vehicle show two different pieces of art. Major stations in all five cities carry wall ads that cut out upgraded scenes from the new version, each with its own “Super” slogan: “Super Evolution”, “Super Showdown”, “Super Invasion”.

One of the campaign's ad trucks in Tokyo. Image: Toei Animation

In the United States, wrapped buses run in New York and Los Angeles, the art goes up at bus stops and subway stations, and shopping malls across North America join in, according to the announcement carried by WEB The Television and Fuji TV’s Mezamashi Media on October 5.

None of the coverage says what Nozawa’s narration on the trucks actually says. In Japan, people will find out by standing on a street corner.

Rebuilt, not just cleaned up

When the project was announced at Makuhari Messe in January, it was billed as an “enhanced” edition, not a remaster. The official English announcement lists “extensive new cuts, revisions to existing scenes, a complete re-rendering of all footage, newly recorded dubbing with added score and sound effects, and a full reconstruction of the story.”

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It retells the start of Dragon Ball Super, the TV series that began in 2015 with Goku’s first clash with the God of Destruction. It takes over One Piece’s old Sunday night slot on Fuji TV. Koichi Yamadera is back as Beerus, and Nozawa is back as Goku. Crunchyroll simulcasts it with English subtitles, though no date has been given for an English dub.

Executive producer Akio Iyoku explained why the series carries the cat-like god’s name. “Above all, it’s his overwhelming power, and the way he stirs a kind of awe toward a god whose next move nobody can predict,” he said in a video shown in Los Angeles in April. “Dragon Ball Super is that kind of series, one that starts moving because this God of Destruction, Beerus, exists.”

Yamadera was simply pleased. “I was happy that Beerus’s name was in the title,” he said in the same video. Jason Douglas, Beerus’s English voice, sent a message too: “I’m really looking forward to seeing Beerus in action in Dragon Ball Super: Beerus!”

Two chairs, two legends

On October 5, Prime Video Japan posted a 41-second message from Yamadera and Nozawa. They sit side by side on two white chairs against a plain wall, her in a pink jacket and a red scarf, him in a grey suit, and run through the basics: the enhanced edition is starting, and Prime Video has the fastest streaming in Japan.

Koichi Yamadera and Masako Nozawa. Image: Prime Video Japan on YouTube

“Look forward to it until it starts streaming, okay!!” one caption reads, in the kind of cheerful, casual Japanese that Goku himself speaks. It ends with both of them waving at the camera and shouting “Bye-byeee!”

Nozawa saw the first enhanced footage in April, in the trailer that premiered at a Dragon Ball event in Los Angeles. Her reaction was pure fan. “That all-out battle between Goku and Beerus, what a surprise! Wasn’t it cool!” she said. “And then at the very end… Frieza himself showed up…!”

Ninety on October 25

Her career runs from a three-year-old child actor on film to the first voice actor the Japanese government has ever honoured as a Person of Cultural Merit, which happened in October 2025.

The 90th birthday has turned into a small event of its own. FAVOLC, a company that makes merchandise with voice actors, launched a “Masako Nozawa 90th Anniversary Project” in August: 16 items in two collections, some printed with portraits from her younger days that she’d kept at her family home. “This project is not about delivering products,” FAVOLC said. “On the great milestone of turning 90, it comes with heartfelt gratitude and respect.”

Then her agency had some fun with it. In September Aoni Production, which represents both Nozawa and Hiroshi Kamiya, posted photos of Kamiya modelling the line, including a T-shirt with Nozawa’s face and the word “GOD” in huge letters. Anime! Anime! collected the replies. “The model is too beautiful to look at directly,” one fan wrote. Another: “The GOD logo is the best! Because it’s Kami-ya-san, after all.” The joke works in Japanese because “kami” means god. “Feels like it’ll raise my luck!” wrote a third.

Still taking new roles

Turning 90 hasn’t meant slowing down. Ranma 1/2 returned for its third season on Nippon TV on October 3, streaming on Netflix right after broadcast, and Nozawa joined the cast as the Iemoto, the head of a traditional school.

“Since she’s the Iemoto, she ought to be refined, quiet and graceful… or so you’d think…” she said when the casting was announced in July, leaving the rest for viewers to find out. She asked fans to keep watching, because “when you all enjoy watching, it encourages us actors too.”

Signing off: Yamadera and Nozawa wave goodbye. Image: Prime Video Japan on YouTube

That makes two new series in a single October. For anyone who works in voice, it’s an encouraging picture. One of the season’s biggest anime launches is being sold with a real actor’s voice coming out of a truck, and the actor is about to turn 90.

Sources: WEB The Television and Mezamashi Media (advertising campaign, October 5, 2026); Dragon Ball Official Site (January and April 2026 announcements, comments from Akio Iyoku, Koichi Yamadera and Jason Douglas); Anime! Anime! (Masako Nozawa’s trailer comment, the 90th anniversary project, fan reactions, the Ranma 1/2 casting and her comment); Prime Video Japan’s YouTube message from Masako Nozawa and Koichi Yamadera (October 5, 2026); Anime News Network (Crunchyroll, Netflix and Fuji TV schedule); Wikipedia (career dates, Guinness and Person of Cultural Merit). Quotations from Japanese sources are translated by Voice Over Herald. Images: Toei Animation (key art and campaign photo), Prime Video Japan (video frames).

Lee este artículo en español: La voz de Goku recorre Japón en un camión. Masako Nozawa cumple 90 años dos semanas después del estreno de Dragon Ball Super: Beerus

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