Ayako Yoshitani

Yoshitani was very shy as a child, and her mother, concerned about her shyness, enrolled her in a theater company, which led her to enter show business. She made her debut as a child actress at the age of four in the 1996 TBS special television series Family Affair, and gained attention for her role as Chieko in the 1997 Nippon TV television series Ryoko: Psychosomatic Physician. During her junior and senior high school years, she concentrated on her studies, but after entering Nihon University, she resumed her acting career, and at the age of 18, she played her first starring role in a film, Tenbatsu, released in 2010. In 2012, she challenged voice acting as Mikoto Urabe, the heroine of the TV anime Mysterious Girlfriend X. She also sang the opening and ending themes. In an interview with Katsutoshi Kitagawa, who produced the music for the show, Yoshitani said, "When I played Urabe, I tried to keep my voice as it was, rather than trying to do the voice of the anime. I tried to play Urabe as he is, not with the anime voice in mind." In a TV commercial for BizReach, a website that handles career changes, in which she has appeared since 2016, she played the role of a female employee and became a popular topic of conversation with the question, "Who is the beautiful woman in that commercial?". In 2017, after auditioning, she appeared as the youngest employee in TBS's Sunday theater Rikuoh starring Koji Yakusho, and in 2019, she gained attention when she appeared as a female pastry chef in TBS's Sunday theater La Grande Maison Tokyo starring Takuya Kimura. In 2020 she starred in TV Tokyo's television series Hal and Ao's Lunch Box, in which she played the lead role in a television series for the first time, along with Kai Inowaki.