Kiyoshi Kobayashi spent more than fifty years as the low growl under Daisuke Jigen's hat brim and never sounded as if he was working at it. It is the least showy voice acting there is, and in The Castle of Cagliostro the funniest.
Fi1m perspective
Jigen hardly moves his mouth. He stands under the brim of a hat, cigarette going, and the voice arrives from somewhere low in the chest, two or three words at a time, and then stops. In The Castle of Cagliostro (1979) Hayao Miyazaki gives him a fork, a single pot of spaghetti and Lupin on the other side of it, and we laughed harder at that than at the car chase. The reason is Kobayashi. Yasuo Yamada's Lupin whines and wheedles and Kobayashi answers with a grunt that lands like a door shutting. He is the straight man, and the straight man is the harder job.
He came from the stage, and in the early 1960s he moved into dubbing, where he became the Japanese voice of James Coburn and Lee Marvin. That is worth knowing, because Jigen is a Lee Marvin part: a gun, a hat, a dislike of conversation. Kobayashi took the role in the 1969 Lupin III pilot, carried it through Lupin the 3rd Part I (1971), and was still saying the lines in 2021. When the other original cast were replaced in 2011, he was kept on. Outside the hat he was Crystal Boy in Space Adventure Cobra (1982) and Watari in Death Note (2006), and we will leave those to people who know them better.
What made it last is that he never pushed. Plenty of actors playing a tough guy for fifty years would start to imitate themselves; Kobayashi simply used his own voice, and because he never strained it, it did not wear out. Gorō Naya's Zenigata gets the big comic despair in Cagliostro and Yamada gets the charm, and Jigen gets almost nothing to do except be there, which is exactly what the character needs. By Lupin III: The First (2019) he was in his eighties, and by Part 6 (2021) some listeners noticed the voice had aged and grown harder to hear. He said as much himself, without complaint. "Because I play the role, he becomes Daisuke Jigen," he said once, and it is the plainest account of the job we have read.
Start with Cagliostro, with the original voices, and listen to how little he does with the spaghetti. Then notice that you would have trusted this man with your life on the strength of a grunt.
Biography
Kiyoshi Kobayashi was a Japanese actor, voice actor and narrator. He was born on 11 January 1933 in Tokyo and died there on 30 July 2022.
He graduated from the arts department of Nihon University and was affiliated with the Tokyo Actor's Consumer's Cooperative Society. Kobayashi was best known for voicing Daisuke Jigen in the Lupin the Third franchise from the 1969 pilot through to Lupin the Third: Part 6 in 2021, a role he held for over fifty years. He also provided the Japanese dub voice for actors including James Coburn and Lee Marvin, and voiced characters such as Watari in Death Note (2006) and Crystal Boy in Space Cobra (1982).
