Daichi Harashima is no show-business novice. He already has three films under his belt and has provided the voice to the leading character in a fourth. He's also won prizes at various festivals and been nominated for awards in Hong Kong. He's even been disqualified once: his nomination for best new artist at the Hong Kong Film Awards in 2004 was rejected when it was revealed that he'd already starred in a film before his breakthrough in Derek Yee Tung-shing's Lost in Time. Not that Daichi cared - after all, he was just six when it happened.
Now eight years old, Daichi says he can't remember much about it. In fact, the Primary Two schoolboy is hard-pressed to articulate much about his film career since his debut in 2002 in the mainland production Happy Mother, in which he plays the toddler son to Loretta Lee Lai-chun. In between his stuttering answers over the telephone from his home in Guangzhou comes the voice of his mother, Reiko, a former culture correspondent, advising Daichi on what to say.
'The hardest time I've had in films is where I have to memorise long lines,' he says, when asked about how difficult filmmaking is. 'But I love acting.'
In his latest venture, he delves into territory that even many established actors might find daunting: dubbing films. In Keita Kohno's Helen the Baby Fox, he voices Taichi, a young boy who takes under his wing a blind and deaf Hokkaido fox.
Whereas some of his fellow star voices failed the test - among them Charlie Young Choi-nei's affected turn as Taichi's mother - Daichi's performance is natural and emotionally balanced, cute but without distracting audiences from what's happening on screen.
'It's not too difficult, except the scenes in which Daichi dreams - when I speak to myself. And it's hard not to cough sometimes,' he says, laughing.
Not that he's made many slip-ups. The disqualification at the film awards three years ago was compensated with a nomination at the Golden Bauhinia Film Awards the same year. Although some might query whether he merits a credit alongside adults who have done much more in their work, one couldn't find fault in his role in Lost in Time.