is a Japanese voice actor, actor and narrator who is currently affiliated with Max Mix. He is married to actress Natsuki Hayashi. Biography As a child, Yao was very active, building secret bases with his friends and playing outside, and did not watch TV much. In addition, because his father was a government official, he had to be transferred every three years, so he moved from place to place. When he was in the second year of junior high school, he was transferred to Tokyo, and the government office building that he moved into was too small for a TV, so his family decided not to have a TV. At that time, his sister, who was four years older than him, and his mother were fond of musicals and plays, and Yao accompanied them to see them. At the time, it was popular for kabuki actors to perform William Shakespeare's plays, and he saw a Shakespeare play starring Kawarasaki Gonjūrō, and when he saw the stage greeting at the final performance of the play, it solidified his desire to become a stage actor. As soon as he graduated from high school and went to college, one of the women in his class was the younger sister of Shōichirō Akaboshi, so he started going to the rehearsal room of Matenrō Theater Company run by Takuya Hiramitsu with her help, and after being involved in a couple of productions as a staff member, he joined the stage as an actor. One of his seniors in the same theater company was Hozumi Gōda. Matenrō Theater Company was one of the more popular small theater companies, but it did not generate enough income to keep them afloat. For a while, Yao worked part-time while doing theater activities, but when he realized that he couldn't go on like this, he consulted with the staff and was introduced to a production company, which led him to get work in TV dramas and movies. Among them, he had an audition for an anime and made his voice acting debut as Shurugi Nam in the OVA BIRTH. Naturally, he had no experience in dubbing, and although he was the lead actor, he did not understand the technical terms included in the director's instructions, but he was helped by his co-stars Keiko Toda and Jōji Yanami, and he still looks up to them as his teachers. In 1985, Yao