Naoki Bandō, the Voice of Robonyan in Yo-kai Watch, Dies at 69. He Taught Himself the Craft

Naoki Bandō, the Japanese voice actor behind Robonyan and dozens of other characters in Yo-kai Watch, died on Monday, September 28. He was 69. Over more than four decades he played giant robots, Gundam scientists, Naruto villains and the Japanese voice of President Logan in 24, and he taught himself most of what he knew.

His agency, Production Ace, announced the death on Friday on its website. “Naoki Bandō, an actor with our company, passed away on September 28, 2026, while receiving medical treatment. He was 69,” the notice says. “We are deeply grateful for the kindness shown to him during his life, and respectfully share this news.”

The wake and funeral are for family only. The agency asks fans and colleagues not to send condolence visits, telegrams, money, offerings or flowers.

Sponichi Annex reports that Bandō was born on December 12, 1957, in Hokkaido, and worked across anime, foreign film and drama dubbing, games and narration. Oricon News called him a celebrated supporting actor who kept working on many titles until recently.

Robonyan and a crowd of yo-kai

For a generation of Japanese children, Bandō was the sound of Yo-kai Watch. He voiced Robonyan, the robot cat, and later Robonyan F, along with Jinmenken, the dog with a man’s face, and the delinquent Gurerurin. His Japanese Wikipedia filmography lists more than two dozen characters across the TV series from 2014 to 2023, the films and the main games.

Image: z tanuki, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Covering a whole bench of minor characters is part of the job for a busy supporting player in Japan, and Bandō made a career of it. Anime News Network describes “a large number of other characters” in the franchise and “numerous other smaller roles over more than four decades in voice acting.” As recently as 2023 he turned up as an elderly curse user in Jujutsu Kaisen.

Yo-kai Watch fans at Montreal Mini-Comiccon, 2016. Photo: Pikawil from Laval, Canada, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

A small actor on a big stage

Bandō didn’t plan to be a voice actor. In a 2012 interview with the Japanese site cakes, given while he was playing the veteran rocket engineer Naoto Fukuda in Space Brothers, he said he joined a theatre company wanting to act on stage. “If you’re small, you just don’t stand out on stage, and good roles were hard to come by,” he said.

What he did have was an ear. He helped out with sound effects for the company’s shows, and a senior member who already worked in voice noticed. “If you’re good with sound, why not give it a try?” the colleague asked him.

The timing was lucky. City Hunter had just started on TV, and he explained that the show had loads of bad guy roles every week, “so they needed bodies.” He was called in almost every week.

Robots, Gundam and a president

His first regular role came in 1991, when he passed the audition for The Brave Fighter of Sun Fighbird and spent a year as the robot Guard Star. “Being a regular really was an education,” he said. Four years later he was back in the same robot franchise, voicing Jet Silver and his combined forms in The Brave of Gold Goldran.

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Gundam fans know him as Vargas Dyson in Mobile Suit Gundam AGE and as Torenov Y. Minovsky in Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin, a pivotal figure in the franchise’s Universal Century timeline. He also played Gato, the shipping tycoon of Naruto’s Land of Waves arc, and Elder Centipede in One-Punch Man.

Photo: Pelpinosas R. Justin James, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Dubbing was the other half of the job. According to Sponichi Annex, he was the Japanese voice of President Charles Logan in 24 and Ronnie Brooks in Law & Order: UK. Gamers heard him as Lord Emon in Shadow of the Colossus and Larikush in Baten Kaitos.

Weekly voice work eventually made two-month stage runs hard to fit in, and he moved to a voice agency. “Before I knew it my name was in the voice actor directories,” he told cakes. “I really built my place in the industry little by little.”

“I worked them out, one at a time”

Bandō never went to a voice acting school, and he was honest about how that felt. “Deep down I have a complex about my training,” he said. “Somewhere there’s still a sulky feeling of, well, I’m just someone who came up through theatre and never properly learned voice acting technique.”

So he built a method himself. “I worked them out, one at a time,” he said of his techniques. Singing, he explained, is about spending breath efficiently. Voice acting isn’t. To match a character, “sometimes you have to use a way of producing your voice that burns through your breath.”

His central idea was that the voice doesn’t live in the mouth alone. The tongue connects to the neck, the neck to the shoulders and chest. “A voice actor has to think of their whole body, right down to the soles of their feet, as their mouth,” he told cakes.

Technique alone wasn’t the point, though. “Just becoming the character in your heart doesn’t mean the voice will come out the way you picture it,” he said. Without real feeling for the role, technique is wasted.

Teaching the next voices

In 2011 Bandō opened his own voice acting school, Shabertech, to teach newcomers. His advice to them, judging by that interview, was about temperament as much as breath. A working voice actor might have to invent two or three new ways of speaking in a month.

“Unless you can get excited about building a role, thinking, right, how shall I cook this one, you probably won’t last,” he said. He also admitted he still loved watching his own episodes go out, pleased with some moments, sorry about others, and envious when someone else nailed a scene. “I still get as up and down about it as a child.”

For voice actors outside Japan, his career is a familiar shape: no famous lead, decades of steady work, a few characters that children will remember for decades, and a craft he pieced together in the booth.

Sources: Production Ace (death notice, October 2, 2026); Oricon News via FM NACK5; Sponichi Annex; Anime News Network; cakes, “Space Brothers anime voice actor interview” (September 20, 2012, via the Internet Archive); Japanese Wikipedia filmography for role years. Quotations from Japanese sources are translated by Voice Over Herald. Hero image: Seibu Railway Yo-kai Watch train, photo by 正和, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Lee este artículo en español: Muere a los 69 años Naoki Bandō, la voz de Robonyan en Yo-kai Watch, que aprendió el oficio por su cuenta

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