Master Sergeant Sakura Yoshio

When searchers recover his body in Volume 5, Sakura is still dressed in his JSSDF uniform. Although he vanished three years earlier, the corpse shows the condition of a recent death, and his watch and portable terminal remain frozen on the exact date and hour of the raid. Medical examiners even match an old arm fracture, documented seven months before the assault, to his remains without any discrepancy.

The novel never shows Sakura alive, so his character emerges only through what others piece together about him. He served with the First Airborne Brigade and joined the strike on NERV headquarters, which frames him as a career soldier who followed orders into an operation that ultimately consumed him.

Three years after the airborne assault on NERV headquarters, a body in military dress turns up, and Misato calls in Lieutenant Colonel Kasuga to identify it. Kasuga arrives with senior officers and a medical team, who confirm the dead man as a soldier listed as missing in action since the raid. Misato suspects fabricated evidence at first, but the timepieces on the body and the perfectly matching medical records rule that out; even prolonged survival under malnutrition would have altered the healed fracture.

Misato concludes that Sakura most plausibly clung to Super Evangelion while it sat inside the Chronostatic Sphere, dying in an attempt to leave it. Standing over him, she is struck by deja vu, a faint memory of a different future in which this man gunned her down.