Kotaro Katsura

About Kotaro Katsura

Kotaro Katsura is a main character of Gintama, a Joi rebel leader and Gintoki's old comrade from the war. Wanted by the shogunate for two decades of bombings and escapes, he leads his faction with total sincerity, total charisma and no sense of proportion, accompanied everywhere by the mysterious Elizabeth. Katsura is the series' purest running gag and, underneath it, one of its most principled men: he never stopped fighting for his teacher's students and his country, he just does it very strangely.

Appearance

Katsura is a striking man with long, straight black hair, calm dark eyes and a traditional bearing that makes him look like a period drama hero who wandered into a comedy. He wears a pale blue kimono with a haori, often with a katana at his hip, and is usually accompanied by Elizabeth, a giant white bird like creature in a costume he treats as a respected comrade. His disguises are frequent and useless, since the hair and the bird give him away instantly. The design is the joke and the truth at once: Katsura is a genuine revolutionary out of the war, drawn like one, in a show that will not let him be dignified for five consecutive minutes.

Personality

Katsura is earnest to a degree that bends reality around him. He delivers revolutionary speeches to pigeons, recruits with the gravity of a founding father, and escapes certain capture with the calm of a man late for lunch. He has no irony at all, which makes him the funniest serious person in the cast and, in the dramatic arcs, suddenly the most credible: a man who has believed the same thing, at full volume, for twenty years. His loyalty to Shoyo's memory and to his comrades is the constant under every disguise, job and explosion.

Background & Story

Katsura studied under Shoyo Yoshida alongside Gintoki, Takasugi and Sakamoto, then fought beside them in the Joi war as a brilliant guerrilla tactician. After the defeat he refused every surrender and amnesty, building a rebel faction that bombs government targets and recruits through sheer charisma, while working part time jobs across Edo under terrible false names. The shogunate hunts him constantly, the Shinsengumi chase him weekly, and he escapes constantly, usually by luck, Elizabeth or a trapdoor. As the story's politics darken, Katsura's faction merges into the wider resistance, and the running gag rebel is revealed, in the final arcs, as one of the few men playing the long game correctly all along.

Powers & Abilities

• Guerrilla Tactics: A veteran commander of the Joi war, Katsura plans bombings, ambushes and escapes that keep a price on his head for two decades despite the whole shogunate hunting him.
• Escape Artistry: Nobody in the series escapes like Katsura: trapdoors, disguises, decoys, Elizabeth. The Shinsengumi have arrested him on screen repeatedly and have never once kept him.
• Oratory and Recruitment: His speeches fill rebel ranks and stop crowds. The charisma is real even when the plans are not, and the final arcs cash in twenty years of accumulated believers.
• Bomb Making: His signature weapon and worst habit. Katsura's devotion to explosives as political expression is the faction's trademark and the neighbourhood's insurance problem.

Key Relationships

• Gintoki Sakata: His comrade from Shoyo's school and the war, now the respectable one, relatively. Katsura drags Gintoki into plots constantly and trusts him absolutely, the series' oldest friendship in both directions.
• Elizabeth: His constant companion, placard communicator and probable royalty. Katsura treats Elizabeth with complete respect and total incuriosity, and their partnership is one of anime's great unexplained institutions.
• Takasugi Shinsuke: His other comrade, whose faction chose annihilation where Katsura chose resistance. They share a teacher, a war and a grief, and their methods split the Joi movement for a generation.
• Shoyo Yoshida: His teacher, the source of his ideals. Katsura's rebellion is, at heart, an attempt to keep faith with what Shoyo taught four orphans about protecting people.

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