Kōichi Shindō

Lanky and tall, Kōichi carries a head of medium-length hair that spikes outward at the tips and parts toward the right, crowned by a stubborn cowlick jutting straight up that Izumi Miyamura privately reads as a mark of foolishness. The strands run a warm orange, and beneath them sit bright lime-green eyes that suit his easy, grinning manner. As a junior high student he wore the hair a little shorter and rougher before it settled into this look.

Sunny and quick to smile, Kōichi was the well-liked kid in middle school who, unlike his peers, reached out to a friendless Izumi instead of shunning him. That kindness came paired with a scatterbrained side early on, and he fumbled Miyamura's name over and over before finally landing it. When Makio Tanihara warned him to steer clear of Izumi over the piercings and gloom, Kōichi pushed back, arguing that the very mood Tanihara scorned was a product of how Tanihara's own crowd had treated the boy, and even later he keeps nudging Tanihara to simply let Miyamura be.

To Kōichi, Izumi is a genuinely fascinating person worth standing beside, and Miyamura in turn credits him as one of the people who taught him he could be himself out in the open. A more earnest streak shows around Chika Ichijō, whose parents' contempt truly wounds him; though he once doubted he deserved her, Miyamura's encouragement hardened his resolve to never quit and to ask her to wait a year for him. Among his friends he is all mischief, roughhousing with Miyamura, even planting a foot on his head, and needling Hori about exactly what she sees in her boyfriend until she squirms.

Kōichi shared a junior high with both Izumi Miyamura and Makio Tanihara before the group scattered across high schools, Izumi heading to Katagiri while Kōichi enrolled at Yasaka on his parents' wish that he aim higher. School has never gone smoothly for him; he has been held back in his final year more than once and admits around Christmas that another repeat looks likely, a record that stokes the disapproval of Chika's family.

His bond with Chika began the instant he confessed and she answered with a plain yes, and it has weathered her parents' scorn ever since, with Kōichi reckoning he pours some sixty percent of his time into her. His tie to Izumi is stranger and no less close, a brotherly friendship of shoves, blunt teasing, and shared secrets in which Kōichi knows Miyamura down to his measurements, arguably better than Hori does. With Tanihara he rebuilt an old friendship after a rift, easing into the role of the trio's exasperated straight man.