If you grew up watching the English dub of Dragon Ball, your first experience with the Japanese sub must have shocked you. Dragon Ball is shonen. It targets male viewers, typically young boys and teenagers, hence the emphasis on action and adventure.

As such, the show’s protagonist (Goku) has a stereotypically gruff voice, the kind you expect to hear from the average man. The Japanese voice (the original) is weirdly shrill and high-pitched and it repels Western and African viewers. They don’t understand why the Japanese Goku sounds like a pre-pubescent boy.

It took the fandom outside Japan several years to realize the truth. Goku in the English dub sounds ‘normal’ because his voice actor (Sean Schemmel) is a man. On the other hand, Goku’s Japanese voice actor is Masako Nozawa: a woman. Masako is not unique.

Many of your favorite male protagonists in anime have female voice actresses, the most notable being Junko Takeuchi for Naruto Uzumaki (Naruto), Romi Park for both Edward Elric and Tao Ren (Full Metal Alchemist and Shaman King respectively), Mayumi Tanaka for Luffy (One Piece), Rica Matsumoto for Ash Ketchum (Pokemon), Kaname Morinaga for Kenshin Himura (Rurouni Kenshin/ Samurai X), Megumi Ogata for Shinji Ikari (Evangelion), and Marina Inoue for Armin (Attack on Titan), to mention but a few.

Granted, this distinction has become less jarring as of late, what with the likes of Amanda Celina Miller (Boruto from Boruto Uzumaki), Maile Flanagan (Naruto from Naruto Uzumaki), Maxey Whitehead (Alphonse Elric from Fullmetal Brotherhood), Erica Mendez (Gon Freecs from Hunter X Hunter), and Brittney Karbowski (Black Star from Soul Eater) gaining prominence for voicing male characters in the English versions of popular anime.

However, this trend is still predominantly a Japanese habit. But why hire female voices for male characters? The first reason is the most obvious: age. Shonen is the biggest anime genre on the market, and most Shonen protagonists are young boys (pre-teens and early teens).

Apparently, female actors do a better job of recreating the male pre-teen voice. Why not hire actual children? Because the One Piece anime has been running for more than two decades and any 12-year-old you hired to voice Luffy in 1999 would have aged out of that role by now.

You see this in choirs where young boys initially come aboard because of their clear, angelic, high-pitched voices. But then puberty strikes and their voices drop an octave. An adult woman can easily approximate a young boy’s voice.

They can also maintain it when the male character in question transitions into his early and late teens. That consistency is vital. You would expect studios to switch voice actors as an anime’s protagonist ages.

However, viewers want to hear what they know. Rather than hiring a man to voice a male character when they enter adulthood, you are better off sticking with the female actress and encouraging them to make mild alterations to their tone to signify maturity. One expert in this field argued that Japanese culture influences this trend.

Supposedly the Japanese associate high-pitched voices with youth and vigour. And if you want to target younger viewers, as well as older audiences who want to recapture their youth, female voices are the only way to go.

But more than likely, it comes down to convenience. Also, consider the fact that most of us don’t even notice the female voices in subtitled anime until we watch the English dub. So clearly, the tactic is working and studios have no reason to change it.

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