Yuzumi Shintani was born on July 20, 2003, in Wakayama Prefecture, Japan.
She grew up in Wakayama through junior high school and entered entertainment while still an elementary-school student.
In 2014, Shintani participated in the Ciao Girl 2014 Audition connected with Shogakukan's girls' magazine Ciao.
She received a Semi-Grand Prix.
The result brought her into Amuse's child-talent environment and the public world surrounding Ciao Girls: magazine modeling, reader events, promotional appearances and performance training.
Historical profiles list film viewing and dance among her interests or skills.
Shintani has also spoken publicly about loving udon and umeboshi or other ume flavors, details closely associated with her Wakayama identity.
Her early entertainment work developed into two group activities in 2016.
First, she became one of the original members of Ciào Smiles, a performance unit created from Ciao Girls.
The seven-member original lineup was: Mirena Kurosawa, Momo Kobayashi, Yui Kato, Kurumi Miyata, Yuzumi Shintani, Yui Uemura, and Karen Kojima.
The group released its debut single, “Nijiiro Smile,” on July 7, 2016.
Ciào Smiles followed it with the DVD single “Song for you” in July 2017 and “chance!!!” in July 2018.
The unit gave Shintani a continuing connection with the Ciao readership and meant that she carried two group schedules during most of her Sakura Gakuin years.
Her second and most formative 2016 group entry came on May 6.
At Sakura Gakuin 2016 Nendo ~Transfer Ceremony~, Shintani was introduced as one of three transfer students.
The other two were Tsugumi Aritomo and Momoe Mori.
Shintani entered as a first-year junior-high-school student.
Unlike Aritomo and Mori, who entered in sixth grade, she joined the group's middle-school cohort immediately and therefore had only three school years available before mandatory graduation.
Sakura Gakuin was organized as a “limited-to-the-growth-period” group.
Its members performed as students in a fictional school, but their movement through grade levels and their graduation after completing junior high were tied to their real ages.
Shintani entered a twelve-member 2016 class led by Student Council President Sara Kurashima.
Her same-grade classmates were Momoko Okazaki, Maaya Asou and Marin Hidaka.
Although Shintani, Asou and Hidaka would eventually graduate together, Okazaki was one school grade above them and graduated in 2018.
Shintani's early Sakura Gakuin character combined a gentle public manner with a willingness to take theatrical risks.
This became especially visible in Sakurademy, the group's annual acting contest.
She won the Sakurademy Actress Award in both the 2016 and 2017 school years.
The back-to-back victories were important early evidence that acting was not simply a career direction selected after idol graduation.
It was already the area in which she repeatedly distinguished herself inside Sakura Gakuin.
In the 2017 contest, the result was exceptionally close between Shintani and Marin Hidaka.
Their improvisational exchange continued beyond the basic prepared performance, and Shintani ultimately received the award for the second consecutive year.
Her first school year also included Sakura Gakuin's first full theatrical production.
In the stage work Akizakura Gakuen Gasshōbu, performed from August 24 through September 4, 2016, Shintani played Yuka Saeki.
This credit matters when describing her later theatre career.
The 2023 production The Monster Won't Attack Me was her first major post-Sakura Gakuin stage lead, but it was not literally her first appearance in a stage play.
Sakura Gakuin also used its annual Song Archaeology presentation to ask members to research and perform older Japanese songs.
Shintani appeared in the series in each of her three school years.
On March 12, 2017, she performed Chiyoko Suizenji's “Sanbyaku Rokujūgo Ho no March,” commonly translated as “365 Steps March.”
On March 4, 2018, she performed Yumi Matsutoya's “Haru yo, Koi.”
On March 3, 2019, she performed Yutaka Ozaki's “Ushinatta 1/2.”
The three selections let her move from bright, rhythmically direct encouragement to more reflective and emotionally restrained material.
The 2017 school year placed Shintani in the middle grade of Sakura Gakuin.
The group was led by Student Council President Aiko Yamaide.
Shintani did not yet hold a council office, but she became one of the senior students responsible for supporting new transfers Miku Tanaka and Miki Yagi.
Her performance identity continued to develop through acting exercises, open classes, concerts and the tension between her reserved offstage image and her more expressive character work.
In interviews from the period, Shintani frequently appeared attentive to the group's overall balance rather than interested only in her own position.
That quality became central in the following year.
On May 6, 2018, Shintani was appointed Sakura Gakuin's eighth Student Council President.
She followed Aiko Yamaide and led a twelve-member group whose graduating class consisted of Shintani, Maaya Asou and Marin Hidaka.
The rest of the 2018 council placed Asou as the second Talk Chairperson, Hidaka as the first Hamidase!! Chairperson, Kano Fujihira as Performance Chairperson and Soyoka Yoshida as Education Chairperson.
The council distributed leadership rather than treating the presidency as the only meaningful role.
Shintani's presidency was characterized less by a commanding or competitive persona than by careful listening, collective decision-making and a stated intention to create an environment where each member's individuality could emerge.
Her final school year also produced her only regular Sakura Gakuin club unit.
At Sakura Gakuin Festival 2018, the Art Club and its Art Performance Unit, trico dolls, made their debut.
The regular members were: Momoe Mori, Yuzumi Shintani, and Yume Nozaki.
Mori was associated with the idea and leadership of the club.
The trio combined visual creation with dance and performance rather than functioning as a conventional vocal subgroup.
Its original song was “C'est la vie.”
The track appeared on Sakura Gakuin 2018 Nendo ~Life Iroasenai Hibi~.
The same festival opened with the comedy sketch “Toki wo Kakeru Shintani,” using Shintani's name and presidential position as the center of a time-travel parody.
For the 2018 graduating class, Sakura Gakuin recorded “clover.”
The song was performed by Yuzumi Shintani, Maaya Asou and Marin Hidaka and became the musical emblem of their shared final year.
It should not be confused with a permanent club unit.
It was a graduating-class song.
On March 25, 2019, the official graduation photobook for the three members was released.
Its location photography took place in Okayama and Hiroshima prefectures, including Kurashiki and Onomichi.
The book documented their final trip as Sakura Gakuin members and was followed by a handover event on March 31.
Shintani graduated from Sakura Gakuin on March 30, 2019, at Kanagawa Kenmin Hall.
The ceremony, The Road to Graduation 2018 Final ~Sakura Gakuin 2018 Nendo Graduation~, drew approximately 2,200 attendees.
She graduated beside Asou and Hidaka after 1,059 inclusive calendar days as a member.
Her Ciào Smiles activity also ended in March 2019.
The end of both groups closed her child-performer and school-idol stage at essentially the same moment.
Shintani's screen acting career began immediately.
Farewell Song, directed by Akihiko Shiota, opened in Japan on May 31, 2019.
The film centered on the fictional female duo HaruLeo, played by Mugi Kadowaki and Nana Komatsu.
Shintani appeared as Yuki, while Marin Hidaka appeared as Maki.
The two played junior-high-school fans of HaruLeo.
Their screen time was brief, but the production became unusually consequential.
Shiota later explained that an unscripted interaction during filming stayed with him.
Hidaka responded to an emotional moment by singing rather than following the expected crying action, and Shintani accepted the change naturally inside the scene.
Their responsiveness helped inspire him to build a later film around them.
In August 2019, Shintani began Yuzumi Shintani no Hitorigoto.
The internet radio and podcast program gave her a space separate from group performance.
Rather than relying on a permanent co-host, it centered her solo talk, reading, film discussion, listener messages and conversations with guests.
The program would continue for nearly six years and became one of the most consistent records of her development from a newly graduated performer into an adult actress.
In 2020, she accumulated her first run of television and film supporting roles.
She appeared as Mayu Oguri in episode four of Shiranakute Ii Koto, broadcast on January 29.
She joined the WOWOW drama Isekai Izakaya “Nobu” as Efa, a hardworking young employee of the otherworld tavern.
The role became one of her longest-running screen assignments.
She returned for the second season in 2022 and the third season in 2023, as well as related online sweets content.
Other 2020 television or streaming appearances included episode two of O-Kane no Kireme ga Koi no Hajimari and episode five of 17.3 about a sex.
Her 2020 films included The God of Novels: The Only Story I Can Write With You, in which she played Rika, and Nozomi, in which she appeared within the school and soccer-club circle surrounding the younger characters.
She also participated in (Instrumental), a film first shown in 2020 and later given a theatrical release in 2022.
The early roles were generally supporting parts, but they exposed her to very different directors, production scales and tones.
In January 2021, Shintani began another important project with fellow Sakura Gakuin graduate Sara Kurashima.
Sara Yuzu TAKE was distributed through OPENREC.tv from January 13, 2021, through August 18, 2022.
The forty-episode program placed the two young actresses in challenges connected with acting, expression and other performance skills.
Its twice-monthly format preserved the comfortable rapport of two Sakura Gakuin graduates while making their post-graduation profession, rather than their former-idol identity alone, the center of the program.
Shintani's 2021 acting work included Hulu's Mairunovich, the short project Kojirase Joshi kara no Sotsugyō, the YouTube short drama Hana Saku Koro ni, Bokura wa and the Spotify audio drama Idol no Housekeeper ni Narimashita.
She also appeared in the Reiwa-era short-film version of Ketsumeishi's “Sakura” and in mol-74's “Replica” music video.
Her most important film from this stage was The World of You, Japanese title Maki no Iru Sekai.
The film received its world premiere at Tokyo FILMeX on November 6, 2021, before opening theatrically on January 29, 2022.
Akihiko Shiota wrote and directed it with Shintani and Marin Hidaka as double leads.
Shintani played Yuki Aono, a high-school student living with a serious chronic illness.
Hidaka played Maki Makino, an unpredictable transfer student whose singing draws Yuki toward a different experience of friendship, music and time.
Shutoku Mukai supplied the music.
Although the first names Yuki and Maki echo Shintani and Hidaka's characters in Farewell Song, the films do not share a narrative universe.
The World of You was a new story created for the two performers after Shiota's experience directing them in the earlier film.
The distinction between their responsibilities is also important.
Hidaka's Maki carries the story's prominent singing and guitar performance, while Shintani's Yuki is the emotional viewpoint through which the audience encounters Maki and the band's formation.
On January 30, 2022, Yuzumi Shintani no Hitorigoto held a public recording at TOKYO FM Hall.
Hidaka and Shiota appeared as guests in connection with The World of You.
The event joined conversation about the film with reading and live-performance elements, bringing Shintani's radio, acting and Sakura Gakuin relationships into one setting.
Shintani's 2022 film slate expanded further.
She appeared as Hasumi Ito in Yagate Umi e to Todoku and as Manami Nishimori in My Small Land.
In My Small Land, Manami is a school friend of Sarya, the Kurdish-Japanese high-school protagonist played by Lina Arashi.
The role placed Shintani inside a film concerned with immigration status, belonging and the limits placed on an adolescent life by systems adults control.
She also appeared as a classmate in Even If This Love Disappears from the World Tonight.
On television and streaming, she played Yui Saitō in Graduation Ceremony, Kamiya Utako Is Not There, Yuzuha Ujiko in Yūagari Sketch and Haruna Niino across selected episodes of Police in a Pod-style procedural Keishichō Sousa Ikka-chō season six.
The same year saw the wider theatrical release of (Instrumental), in which she played Kako Atsuo in a past-time strand of the story.
By 2023, Shintani was working across film, television, audio performance, readings and conventional theatre.
She appeared in the morning serial segment Papa to Nacchan no Obentō as Kana Sasaki and returned as Efa for the third season of Isekai Izakaya “Nobu.”
On January 29, she participated in two performances of the musical reading production The Little Prince Le Petit Prince ~Kimi to Boku~ at BAROOM, paired with Yoshitsugu Abe.
People Who Talk to Plushies Are Kind opened in April 2023.
Shintani played Yui Shiroki, one of the central members of a university club whose participants speak to stuffed animals about emotions they find difficult to express elsewhere.
The film's careful treatment of gender expectations, vulnerability and the need for safe forms of communication made the role one of her most substantial ensemble-film performances.
Her other 2023 film work included Yutori desu ga Nani ka International and the mixed documentary and dramatic project Searching for Antonio Inoki.
She appeared in the short or compact projects Nantomo Nai yo. and Melos no Tanjō, and in the WOWOW anthology Ningen Kowai 2.
She also appeared in Watashi no Miteiru Sekai ga Subete, produced earlier and released theatrically in 2023, as Mami Yamashita.
From August 30 through September 3, 2023, Shintani led Masaya Okamoto's stage production Kaijū wa Osotte Kurenai, translated here as The Monster Won't Attack Me, at Shinjuku Theater Tops.
She played Kokko, a fifteen-year-old who moves through the Kabukichō and Tōyoko environment.
The production was her first major professional stage lead after Sakura Gakuin and marked a new degree of responsibility in live dramatic work.
A director's-cut screen version of the stage performance opened in 2024.
It should be catalogued as a filmed and edited theatrical performance rather than as a separately shot narrative feature.
Shintani's 2024 activity was particularly dense.
In Tada, Anata wo Rikai Shitai, released on February 23, she played Aoi and also created the title calligraphy.
That visual contribution is a small but notable extension beyond acting alone.
She appeared as Maki Rin in Blue Imagine, a film centered on young performers living in a shared refuge while confronting sexual violence and abuses of power in the entertainment environment.
She participated in the omnibus film Toritsukushima as Shizuka and played Ichika, a friend of protagonist Kana, in Yōko Yamanaka's Desert of Namibia.
Desert of Namibia was presented in the Directors' Fortnight section at Cannes and received the FIPRESCI prize there.
That recognition belongs to the film within its festival context; it should not be represented as an individual acting award for Shintani.
She also appeared as Ayako in the two-part 2024 film Shizukanaru Don 2 and as heroine Asami in Tracing Journey: Re-enact.
In the social-media drama 30 Nen-go no Hajimemashite, released through TikTok beginning April 14, she led the story as Riko, a science-fiction film fan whose communication crosses a thirty-year gap.
Additional 2024 work included the short drama Zutto Kimi no Soba ni Imashita, an appearance in the first episode of Shinjuku Yasen Byōin, the NUMA ear drama Shika no Okimono and the short films Wani Seikatsu @@ and Jikka shown through the MOOSIC LAB environment.
In Jikka, she played the lead role of Koharu.
From July 12 through July 14, 2024, Shintani returned to the stage in Koinutachi no Gogo at Shimokitazawa Alley Hall.
She played Michi Yamashiro.
The production, part of a “Kids Noir” series, examined young people drawn toward illegal or exploitative “dark part-time job” schemes.
Representative commercial work from this broader period included campaigns for Yondenko and Maxell.
In Maxell's 2024 corporate campaign “Analog Nano ni, Omoikkiri Mirai,” Shintani appeared in the “Isekai” installment with Seira Takemichi and Momoka Goto.
Earlier advertising credits included work connected with Shuei Yobikō and Nintendo's Animal Crossing: New Horizons and Nintendo Switch spring campaign.
The beginning of 2025 brought what became the final group of projects released while Shintani was publicly active under Amuse.
She appeared in Nonrem no Mado 2025 New Year Special on January 5.
In February, the adaptation Kyō no Sanponta, or Today's Walk with Ponta, began distribution on FOD.
Shintani played Rieko, the central human character, opposite Ponta, whose voice was performed by Ken Yasuda.
The eight short episodes followed the contrast between Rieko's interpretation of her daily walks and the dog's more sardonic internal reactions.
The series began on FOD on February 21, aired on Fuji TV TWO from February 22 and reached terrestrial Fuji TV in March and April.
The role gave Shintani a light comic lead very different from the heavier dramatic material of several recent films.
In March 2025, she released the 2025–2026 calendar Ashiato.
Shintani was involved in developing its concept, and the locations were selected to trace places associated with her approximately ten years in entertainment.
The title means “footprints” or “traces,” making the calendar unusually retrospective even before her departure was announced.
A release event was held at HMV & BOOKS SHIBUYA on March 8.
The calendar covers April 1, 2025, through March 31, 2026.
Its date range does not establish that she was professionally active throughout that period; it is the coverage period of a product released before her hiatus.
Yuzumi Shintani no Hitorigoto ended on April 30, 2025.
On the same date, Shintani announced the end of her Amuse affiliation and her decision to step away from the entertainment work she had been doing.
She called the coming interval a “charging period.”
Her message expressed gratitude for the experiences and people of the preceding eleven years, while explaining that she wanted to encounter a wider world beyond the range in which she had previously lived.
The wording left open the possibility of a future return but did not promise one or provide a schedule.
It is therefore most accurate to describe her present status as on hiatus or away from entertainment activity.
Calling her definitively retired goes beyond the announcement.
Calling her an active freelance actress also goes beyond the public record, because she did not announce a new independent business structure or representation.
On May 9, 2025, Apple Japan released Hirokazu Kore-eda's short film last scene online.
The approximately twenty-seven-minute film was shot on an iPhone 16 Pro and included Shintani in its ensemble cast.
Because the project had been completed before its release, its appearance after April 30 does not by itself show that Shintani resumed activity after announcing her charging period.
As of August 30, 2026, no verified new agency, public professional return or new post-hiatus production has been announced.
Her private life and activities during the charging period have not been made part of the professional public record and should not be inferred from silence.