Chiaki Kobayashi

Chiaki Kobayashi (Japanese: 小林千晃; born June 4, 1994) is a Japanese voice actor signed to Osawa Office, known to BL audiences as the voice of Adachi Kiyoshi (安達清) in the 2024 anime adaptation of Cherry Magic! Thirty Years of Virginity Can Make You a Wizard?!

Kobayashi was born in Kanagawa Prefecture. He first set out to be a live-action actor and enrolled at a film school in his mid-teens, but has said he gave up that ambition after concluding that he could never become Masaki Suda. He went to university instead, and it was there, under the influence of the animated films he loved, that he decided to become a voice actor. He began working professionally in his early twenties and has been represented by Osawa Office since.

His earliest credited anime work came in 2017, in minor parts in Just Because!, Detective Conan and The Idolmaster SideM. In 2019 he was cast in his first leading role, Hiroto Kuga in Gundam Build Divers Re:RISE. At the 15th Seiyu Awards, held on March 6, 2021 for work in the 2020 fiscal year, he received the Best New Actor Award (新人男優賞), sharing the category that year with Masahiro Ito and Shinba Tsuchiya.

Leading roles since then have included Langa Hasegawa in SK8 the Infinity (2021), Gabimaru in Hell’s Paradise (2023), Mash Burnedead in Mashle: Magic and Muscles (2023-2024), Stark in Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End (2023-2024) and Yoshiki Tsujinaka in The Summer Hikaru Died (2025), the last of which brought him a nomination for Best Voice Artist Performance (Japanese) at the 2026 Crunchyroll Anime Awards. He also works in foreign-language dubbing, including Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024), and presented the radio programme Chiaki Kobayashi’s Blue Monologue on Bunka Hoso’s Chou! A&G+ from 2021 to 2025.

In Cherry Magic he heads the voice cast of the twelve-episode television anime animated by Satelight, broadcast on TV Tokyo from January to March 2024, and he reprises Adachi in the compilation film released on December 13, 2024. Both are catalogued on BLGLFLIX as separate title records, WP 1638 for the anime series and WP 1641 for the anime film, and Kobayashi is credited on each as voice actor.

He should not be confused with the performers who play the same character in other adaptations: Adachi is played by Eiji Akaso in the 2020 TV Tokyo live-action drama and the 2022 film, and by Ryo Matsuda in the 2025 stage musical. The three are entirely separate people, and Japanese sources reserve the billing term shuen (主演, “starring”) for the live-action and stage casts rather than for the anime voice cast.