Tsutomu Asai

Brown eyes and cropped dark hair mark his youthful look.

He comes off as a straightforward, sports-driven boy whose life revolves around volleyball, the thread that ties him to Minako both in the past and when they meet again.

Before the series began, the two shared a seventh-grade volleyball team, and he nursed a crush on her, meaning to propose once he climbed to a better position on the roster, though that moment never played out on screen. They drifted apart afterward until Sailor Moon S, roughly two years on, when his stray volleyball rolled up beside her and reunited them. Minako felt drawn to him, yet her feelings leaned more toward a longing for her old ordinary life than toward him. When he said he wanted a girlfriend who played volleyball and asked her to rejoin the team, she began weighing whether to give up being a Senshi, until she learned he already had a girlfriend. He was later struck by a Daimon and stripped of his Pure Heart Crystal. Sailor Venus arrived and took the Daimon down with a leaping spinning dig, the same signature volleyball serve she used in her playing days. Watching her, Asai realized that Sailor Venus was Minako. Once his heart crystal was returned, he asked her to pass along his thanks to Sailor Venus should she ever meet her, all but confirming he had pieced together the truth.