Waaaa! Ha! Mai Shiranui here! Ta-da! Joe had a title match coming up in his home country of Thailand, to defend his title in Lumpinee, so he couldn't be here today. His opponent sounds like a really tough guy! Hehe, you know Joe, that made him even more fired up. So that being the case, I'll be introducing his profile for him! I bet you're happier having me do it anyway, right? Hehehe. Well then, let's get right to it! Here we goooo...!

Name	Higashi, Joe. Call me Joe.
Fighting style	I'm a Muay Thai fighter.
Nationality	Despite his appearance, he's Japanese like me!
Birthday	March... twenty...ninth? I think?
Age	The way he looks, I can't believe he's 23!
Height	180cm.
Weight	72kg.
Blood type	AB-type. A bit unusual, no?
Hobby	Joe likes fighting--it doesn't matter what about!
Favorite food	Fried... alligator?!
Forte in sports	Any kind of fighting sport, I bet. Basically Joe's a savage who only lives to get radical.
Important things	His hachimaki of course! It's Joe's trademark, right?
Dislikes	Joe's worthless at studying, so he hates school.

Nobuyuki Hiyama first voiced Joe in 1993, but not in a game -instead, he voiced him in the Fatal Fury 2 anime. He would then also voice Joe in the Fatal Fury movie in 1994, at which point SNK apparently liked his portrayal so much they decided to bring him in to voice Joe in the games, starting with 1995's Fatal Fury 3. He would voice Joe in all of the Fatal Fury games, and also the King of Fighters series from KoF '95 onwards. The last time he did the voice for Joe was in 2010's KoF XIII. His other SNK roles include Gai in Buriki One and Gowcaizer in Voltage Fighter Gowcaizer.

It's unknown the real reason Hiyama didn't voice Joe for his KoF '96 Collection interview. The most popular theories fans have is that SNK didn't want to pay him to do it, or there were simply scheduling conflicts and he couldn't be there (I think the latter is more likely). Something I've read is that most of SNK's voice actors and actresses were Osaka based, whilst Nobuyuki was Tokyo based, so that might have been part of the problem as well.

Hiyama is an extremely popular voice actor in Japan, and has a massive filmography. His breakout role was Hiei, a character from YuYu Hakusho. From there he's voiced characters in many different anime series, check his Wikipedia filmography for more info. His other video game roles include Demitri in the Darkstalkers series, Siegfried in the Soul series, and Link in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.