Tadaomi Karasuma

Karasuma cuts a striking figure, tall and heavily muscled, with dark eyes that fix on people sharply beneath spiky black hair and matching brows. His everyday uniform is a crisp business suit in black over a white shirt and dark tie, a look his students simply call cool.

Discipline defines him: he is firm yet fundamentally decent, holding the class at arm's length out of professional habit and his standing as a government operative. Romance sails almost entirely over his head, though he is not so hopeless that he never eventually catches on. For all his coolness he is not without feeling, and on rare occasions, oddly enough often mid-combat, a flash of genuine enjoyment breaks through.

Before the classroom, Karasuma served in the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force's 1st Airborne Brigade, respected for his conditioning, discipline, and skill as both an elite soldier and drill instructor. After making warrant officer he was pulled into the Ministry of Defense as one of its top agents and handed the assignment to capture and kill the creature later dubbed Koro-sensei. That mission put him in front of Class 3-E, where he signed on as the physical education instructor, drilling the students in fitness, combat technique, and small-unit tactics.

His first real spotlight comes when a former comrade, Akira Takaoka, briefly seizes his teaching post with sadistic methods. Karasuma reclaims the role and, challenged to pick a student for a live-blade duel, selects Nagisa on the strength of a chill he had felt during an earlier ambush attempt. Nagisa's victory confirms the boy's raw talent for assassination and leaves Karasuma uneasy about whether such a gift should be nurtured at all.

The Okinawa operation tests him further. When students fall to a manufactured virus, he leads the healthy ones into the mastermind's hotel, absorbing a dose of Smog's gas that sidelines him for much of the raid before the enemy is unmasked as Takaoka once again. Later, during the God of Death crisis, he sets the official order to kill Korosensei aside to protect his students, disarming traps and beating the assassin in brutal close combat. Around this period his bond with the class hardens into a genuine, if guarded, loyalty.

By the final stretch he is quietly working in the students' favor. He feeds them intelligence about the Wolfpack mercenaries and their leader Craig Houjou, deliberately misleads the mercenaries into underrating the class, and sends Irina to help engineer their breakout to the mountain classroom. When Korosensei's life reaches its end, the teacher entrusts Class E's future to him, and Karasuma speaks his name aloud for the first time just before Nagisa carries out the execution.

Afterward he blocks the Self-Defense Force from storming the grounds so the class can grieve, arranges their departure, and handles the reward money on the government's behalf. Seven years on he has married Irina, whom he had earlier invited into both the Ministry and his home, risen to a senior intelligence post, and started a family, the two of them now running missions together as a pair.