Eri Tokunaga

Eri Tokunaga (Japanese: 徳永えり, born 9 May 1988) is a Japanese actor from Suita in Osaka Prefecture, signed to FLaMme. She has been working continuously since 2004 and has built up more than eighty screen credits, most of them in Japanese television.

She got in almost by accident. In her second year of junior high school she entered the seventh Pichi Model audition in 2002, by her own account without expecting anything from it, and came away with the runner-up prize. She spent the next three years as a reader model for the magazine Pichi Lemon, billed as Erina Tokunaga and photographed mostly in close-up for make-up and hair features, graduating from the magazine with the May 2005 issue. While she was still modelling she put herself forward for an audition at the agency FLaMme and passed it. She has since said there was no grand plan behind the choice.

Her acting debut came in 2004 in the Fuji TV drama Houkago, and she has used the name Eri Tokunaga ever since. Her first film, Throws Out My Hometown in 2006, gave her a leading role straight away, and in 2008 she went on stage for the first time in the musical Phantom. The recognition arrived in 2010 with Masahiro Kobayashi’s Haru’s Journey, which brought her the Sponichi Grand Prix Newcomer Award at the Mainichi Film Awards and Best New Actress at the Japan Movie Critics Awards.

Since then she has been one of those actors Japanese television reaches for constantly. She played Yayoi Sawada, the heroine’s closest friend, in the 2012 NHK morning serial Umechan Sensei, her first asadora, and returned to the format in Warotenka (2017) and Yell (2020). Her first leading role in a drama came in 2013 with the Oita-produced Kyo mo Jigoku de Omachi shite imasu, and her first lead in a network serial in 2018 with TV Tokyo’s Koi no Tsuki. Other credits include Bloody Monday (2008) as Mako Anzai, Dr. DMAT (2014), the Netflix series Hibana: Spark (2016), Jimmy: The True Story of a True Idiot (2018), Love and Fortune (2018) as Wako Taira, Unsung Cinderella (2020), Police in a Pod (2021) as Shiori Sakura, The Honest Realtor (2022) and The Right to Judge (2025).

She has kept a foot in independent film and theatre throughout. She led Tsukigime Otoko Tomodachi in 2019, which screened in the Japanese Cinema Splash section of the 31st Tokyo International Film Festival, took the lead in Gekidan Tagumi’s eighteenth production the same year, and appeared in Zutto Dokushin de Iru Tsumori? in 2021 as the only married woman in the group.

In Hold on, Harutora-kun (ちょっと待とうよ、春虎くん, MBS, 2026) she plays Aya Kurobe.