Shinji Iijima

Compact and boyish, Shinji carries the slight frame of a young teenager. His eyes are wide and brown, set in a still-childish face, and his hair is kept a plain shade of the same color. Whenever he turns up, he is dressed in the protective uniform of his school's kendo club.

At the outset he is a genuine coward, quicker to bolt from trouble than to face it. That shifts under Ikkaku Madarame's rough mentorship, which draws out enough grit for him to try to reverse the humiliation his upperclassmen suffered. Watching him drill, Ikkaku notices that a fierce hunger to grow stronger has lit up the boy's gaze, despite his having seemed the least gifted of the bunch.

The trouble begins when members of Kotei Academy's kendo club corner Shinji on his walk home, only for his own club's seniors to step in and shield him. The next morning, class president Mizuho Asano taps him and the other freshmen to fill out a squad for a bout against that rival school. Mizuho then recruits Ikkaku as a trainer, and the regimen he imposes is brutal: hauling him along in a boulder-laden cart, hopping up temple steps, striking while inverted, and lugging heavy stones while bound in rope.

Most of the team collapses from the strain, ending up worse off than the injured members they were meant to replace, yet Shinji keeps crossing blades with Ikkaku long after the others give out. When he volunteers to stay on and attempts to enlist Yumichika Ayasegawa and Rangiku Matsumoto fall flat, Ikkaku instead rounds up Tōshirō Hitsugaya, Renji Abarai, and a reluctant Keigo Asano. On match day Shinji fights fourth with the tally at two wins to a single loss; steeling himself, he lands the point that clinches the team's win, after which Ikkaku takes the floor and flattens what is left of the opposing side.