Taketo Nazawa

Taketo is lean and stands roughly as tall as Zoro. His hair is short and neatly combed, and he wears thin spectacles along with a robe decorated in a bamboo motif.

For years Taketo passed as an excellent administrator, cherished by the townsfolk and praised as brilliant by his brother Umeno. The truth runs colder. He treats the city's troubles as someone else's burden, hands out bribes without hesitation, and sneers at the local vigilante corps, dismissing Zoro as a mere thug. Beneath the polished image he is coldly ruthless and unbending in his convictions, willing to kill his own father over a disagreement and indifferent to the city's future so long as his own comfort lasts.

Taketo was the elder son of headman Matsuba Nazawa and the older brother of Umeno. In his youth he helped reinforce the city's failing embankment, calculating the placement of the stones. He came to despise his father's reverence for tradition, believing it ignored economics and diplomacy, and about four years before the story he set the city's paper workshop ablaze, killing Matsuba inside it and stepping into the role of headman. When Umeno introduced Zoro and the swordsman crushed a vigilante in a test bout, Taketo recruited him, later warming to him enough to use him as a bodyguard while still looking down on him. After Zoro stumbled onto the secret Seven-Colored Paper and pressed about Matsuba's death, Taketo dismissed him and leaned on the bribed Commander Nezumi to bury the inquiry. His scheme to ship fifty-five crates of the paper to a foreign king collapsed when Zoro destroyed the river embankment, wrecking the merchant vessel. With Matsuba's will surfacing through Umeno, Taketo lost his position and was handed to the Marines.