Character · Gintama
Gintoki Sakata
Sugar, a wooden sword and a dead-eyed stare: the samurai guarding Edo mostly wants to be left alone with a parfait.
In Otakana the clue reads: Silver-haired samurai addicted to sugar
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Gintama
- Letters
- 7 · Normal
Gintoki Sakata runs Yorozuya, an odd-jobs business in an Edo where aliens landed, won and stayed. He takes any work that covers the rent, which it usually does not, and his diet is roughly strawberry milk and sugar. The perm is natural. The dead fish eyes are a joke Hideaki Sorachi returns to whenever the story threatens to become dignified about anything.
All of it hides a war record. Before the occupation he fought as one of the rebel swordsmen the new government still has nightmares about, and Gintama switches from toilet humour to that history without warning, often inside one chapter. The whiplash is the point. A parody episode about a games console can end with a man refusing to walk away from someone.
Sorachi serialised Gintama in Weekly Shonen Jump from 2003 and it ran for fifteen years and more than seven hundred chapters, with an anime that broke the fourth wall until the wall stopped being load-bearing. The title joins gin, silver, to tama, and the pun buried in it is considerably cruder than most English readers ever find out.
Spelling GINTOKI
GINTOKI is the given name; Sakata is the family. Seven letters, three beats, gin-to-ki, opening with the same gin, silver, that starts the series title. The final I is the letter that goes missing, because English ears hear the name stopping at GINTOK. Two I's, no doubled consonants and no long vowel to argue about.