Hidetomo Kajōmaru

Glasses sit on a face of unremarkable stature, an officer of roughly average build. His light hair reaches a middling length and is swept back for the most part, with a handful of loose strands hanging beside his cheeks. He dresses in the usual black robes of a Soul Reaper, adding a trio of piercings in each ear and a band wrapped around either wrist.

Kajōmaru carries himself as an instructor at heart, patient with green recruits and willing to forgive their lateness before easing into explanation. His mind is his strongest asset: he holds a firm grasp of history the Academy has stopped teaching, from the Quincy purge to the reasoning behind it, and he lays it out plainly for anyone who asks. He frames the conflict without self-flattery, insisting that a genuine war is one in which each side believes its own cause is just rather than one clean side of righteousness.

A graduate of the Shin'ō Academy, Kajōmaru rises to the sixth seat of the Thirteenth Division under Captain Jūshirō Ukitake. When the Wandenreich strikes, he takes newcomers Ryūnosuke Yuki and Shino Madarame under his wing, laying out how Soul Reapers act as balancers who keep the flow of souls even between the living world and the Soul Society, and why the Quincy, by wiping out Hollows outright, upset that balance until extermination was ordered two centuries earlier. On patrol near the Shakonmaku, he reassures the anxious Ryūnosuke that any invasion must come through a gate and will be signaled in advance, only for Yhwach to materialize overhead and mock the claim. Columns of blue flame soon tear up around them. Faced with Jugram Haschwalth, Kajōmaru draws his blade, a plain katana fitted with a rectangular guard, and swears to hold the line, but the Quincy names his fear and splits him vertically in two before he can strike. Series notes place his family among sculptors and, by another account, tattoo artists who inked both Shūhei Hisagi and Rikichi Yuki.