Attack On Titan's Mikasa Voice Actress Yui Ishikawa Deals With Scary Stalker Incident
Just after the final episode of "Attack on Titan" premiered in November 2023, a clip of voice actor Yui Ishikawa, in which she breaks down into tears after delivering her final line as Mikasa Ackerman, went viral. Ishikawa started voicing Mikasa, one of the most powerful "Attack on Titan" characters, back in 2013. And just before the end of 2023, Ishikawa's name ended up in the news again for an altogether different and unsettling reason when a young man was arrested over death threats he directed toward her.
According to a report by the Japanese news outlet Jiji Press, this incident dates back to November of 2023, when a 25-year-old man named Fukuta Kishimoto was identified as the author of posts to an online message board threatening to kill Ishikawa. Police in Kyoto's Nakagyo Ward arrested him, after which he pled guilty to intimidation. It was Ishikawa's agency that found the offending posts and subsequently turned them over to the police in hopes that the author would be held legally responsible. While the frequency of his death threats is unspecified, it appears he named Ishikawa and threatened to take her life on more than one occasion in the lead-up to his arrest.
This isn't even the first time that Kishimoto has targeted Ishikawa. In a similar case dating back to 2020, he was found to have made threats toward the "Attack on Titan" voice actor as well.
Harassment of voice actors is a serious issue
Fukuta Kishimoto was previously arrested in 2020 for posting death threats toward the director of the anime "Kemono Friends," who works under the alias TATSUKI. According to the Tokyo Reporter, Kishimoto used roughly the same language to target both TATSUKI back then and Ishikawa in the more recent incident. Police then went on to investigate threats he also directed at that time toward Yui Ishikawa, who voices a character in "Kemono Friends 2."
Unfortunately, the fact that Ishikawa received targeted death threats is unsurprising given the frequency with which voice actors in particular experience harassment. According to one study published by The Japan Times, 25.7% of voice actors and announcers reported experiencing sexual harassment in particular, whereas almost 70% of that same group recounted a co-worker directing hurtful remarks toward them. Those numbers are roughly 5% and 20% higher respectively than the rates at which screen actors shared that they experienced those same forms of abuse