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.^[4] She made her debut as a child actress at the age of four in the 1996 TBS special television series Family Affair,^[2] and gained attention for her role as Chieko in the 1997 Nippon TV television series Ryoko: Psychosomatic Physician.^[5] During her junior and senior high school years, she concentrated on her studies, but after entering Nihon University, she resumed her acting career,^[6] and at the age of 18, she played her first starring role in a film, Tenbatsu, released in 2010.^[5] In 2012, she challenged voice acting as Mikoto Urabe, the heroine of the TV anime Mysterious Girlfriend X.^[7] 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."^[8] 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?".^[7] In 2017, after auditioning, she appeared as the youngest employee in TBS's Sunday theater Rikuoh starring Koji Yakusho,^[7] 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.^[9] 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.^[10]

On January 1, 2024, Yoshitani announced her marriage to actor Ryutarou Akimoto on her official social media account.^[11]