Pazu

Standing a shade under five foot ten, Pazu is a partial cyborg with brown hair and matching brown eyes. He turns up in the opening episode of Stand Alone Complex, backing Boma and Batou as they run down a hacker who has been shadowing Section 9, and from there he tends to operate at the fringes of a case rather than its center.

Cold, quiet, and detached, Pazu moves through Section 9 like a self-contained loner carrying a streak of menace. He knows every underhanded tactic and feels no hesitation about using them, yet his devotion to the people he trusts is beyond doubt, and he keeps an easy off-duty rapport with Boma and Batou. His love life is famously reckless and crowded with women, summed up by the line he gives the Major at their first meeting, that he never beds the same partner twice.

Before Section 9, whispers in police circles pegged Pazu as a former gangster who had run with several yakuza outfits, and inside the unit he became the all-purpose backup for field agents as well as its resident chain smoker, frequently paired with the bomb expert Boma. Through the Laughing Man and Individual Eleven investigations he stuck to discreet, off-the-books legwork. His strangest chapter arrives in the 2nd GIG episode Face, set against the hunt for the fugitive cyborg Hideo Kuze.

A prosthetic-face sculptor links him to Kaori Kawashima, a spurned former lover who has rebuilt her body into an exact duplicate of his own. Furious at being discarded and unable to trace a man whose job keeps him hidden, she spirals into murderous obsession, resolving to erase everyone until a single Pazu remains, then to kill the real one and take his identity. Granted the Major's permission to settle the matter alone, Pazu lets Kaori find him; their meeting collapses into a knife fight that ends with one Pazu stabbed through the eye. Because both bodies bear identical torso wounds and the survivor stays silent, it is never confirmed which one lived.

Afterward Batou and Motoko review the autopsy, with Motoko openly unsure whether the original walked away and Batou allowing only that it is possible. Whoever he now is, Pazu stays alongside Borma and Saito, supporting the team through the Refugee Revolution. He is also the sole founding member of Section 9 absent from the 2017 live-action film, where Ladriya takes his place.