Still sounding young at 85, she is the voice of old Japan

TOKYO — The cast gathered in the recording studio, taking turns at the microphones as animated scenes from one of Japan’s most beloved television cartoons played on screens in front of them. Midori Kato, 85, was the only gray-haired head in the room. She closed her eyes, appearing to doze for a moment until it was her character’s turn. She stepped up to a microphone, her shoulders slightly stooped and her gnarled hands grasping the paper script.

But when she opened her mouth to speak, it was with a cheerful, slightly nasal twang: the voice of a 24-year-old stay-at-home mother. To generations of Japanese, she is Sazae-san, the titular character of the world’s longest-running animated television series.

Since “Sazae-san” began airing on Sundays at 6:30 p.m. in 1969, Kato has voiced the bossy but kind, absent-minded woman who is forever sheepish about some mishap. Kato was recently honored with a Guinness World Record for the longest career as a voice actor for the same character in an animated TV series. She is the only remaining member of the original cast.

“Sazae-san” still airs weekly on Fuji TV in its original time slot. It portrays the day-to-day antics of Sazae, her husband and 3-year-old son, along with her parents (voiced by actors much younger than Kato), her mischievous elementary-age brother and sweet younger sister. The three generations live in a suburban house in Tokyo, mostly frozen in the staunchly traditional time period of the earliest episodes. There is even a phrase, “Sazae-san syndrome,” referring to the Sunday night blues before the workweek begins.

The characters, who never age, are named after seafood products. Sazae (a mollusk that is a culinary delicacy in Japan) has maintained the same distinctive tripartite hairstyle for 55 years. The characters make calls on rotary phones or from telephone booths, and plot points often turn on missed communication that would not occur in the era of texting.

The show’s family dynamics and gender roles remain patriarchal. Neither Sazae nor her mother works outside the home, while her father and husband commute to distant offices, returning late and frequently drunk. The women do all the housework, child care and cooking, while the men largely wait to be served.

Kato, who was widowed three years ago and has no children, said the family structure in the show was familiar from her own childhood.

She grew up in suburban Tokyo in a family where “children were not supposed to pick up our chopsticks until our father did so.” Her father always bathed first, and “when someone left a newspaper open on the table, we were strictly scolded.”

Although the show’s characters have remained largely static for more than half a century, Kato still enjoys the two-hour recording sessions in a Tokyo studio every week. “The stories are funny, aren’t they?” she said during an interview after a recent taping. “So I never get bored. Never.”

Shunichi Yukimuro, a screenwriter who has written for the series for about 45 years, said the producers insist that the show maintain its period setting. He recalled when a younger writer put in a scene showing Sazae asking her husband to pick up clothes from a dry cleaner. That did not work, Yukimuro said, because in the 1960s, “it would be totally unacceptable for a family with two full-time housewives” to ask a man to do such a task.

In a country where nearly one-third of the population is 65 or older, the show attracts a loyal — albeit shrinking — audience.

For elderly viewers, “death is the worst thing they are afraid of,” said Kato. “Old women say, ‘This is good! The characters live forever.’”

The show’s popularity peaked in the late 1970s, when it was the No. 1 cartoon on broadcast television in Japan and 40% of television-owning households in the country’s central region tuned in. Now, that figure fluctuates around 6% or 7%, amid a general decline in appointment-television watching.

“Sazae-san’s” gender roles are in some ways consistent with entrenched values and economic incentives that remain in Japan.

Mothers still perform far more housework and child care than fathers. Married couples must legally share the same surname, with wives much more likely than husbands to take their spouse’s last name.

“This kind of basic gender contract has not changed,” said Taotao Matsui, a professor of marketing at Rissho University in Tokyo. Japan’s tax system, in which nonworking spouses of full-time salaried employees can earn a pension, is “based on the Sazae-san model.”

Society has moved on in some ways: Women are much more likely to work outside the home. Many women choose not to marry or have children. Few suburban families live in multigenerational homes, and grandparents often see their grandchildren only on holidays.

For loyal fans, “Sazae-san” has “become a time capsule,” said Deborah Shamoon, associate professor of Japanese studies at the National University of Singapore. “It’s become a rosy view of how things used to be.”

The television series is based on a comic strip that ran in two newspapers from 1946 to 1975. The cartoonist, Machiko Hasegawa, who died in 1992, was the first woman to pen a regular comic strip — or manga — in a daily Japanese newspaper, and the first in Japan to have her work adapted for television.

The early comics portrayed the hardships of life after World War II, when poverty-stricken Japanese lined up for rice rations or shopped on the black market. Sazae was a confident, single young woman unafraid to speak her mind.

By the time the television series aired, Sazae’s independence was sanded down and she was married to a salaried office worker and was the mother of a toddler. The family had become firmly middle-class.

Ryusuke Hikawa, a professor of Japanese animation technology and cultural studies at Meiji University, said the show gives people living in uncertain times “a sense of security.”

“It’s a big family whose members often quarrel and are a little clumsy but live happily together,” he said. “It’s inevitable that the expiration date will eventually come.”

Kato herself feels wistful about the world portrayed in the show. She used to live near a nursery school, she said, and observed children crying as their working mothers dropped them off in the morning. As someone who never had children herself, she said, after her husband died, “living alone is tough.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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