Sakata Gintoki (Jap 坂田 銀時, Sakata Gintoki) is the main protagonist of Gintama. A founder and leader of Yorozui, and a highly skilled samurai who fought in the Joi War in the past. During the war, he became known as the White Demon (“Shiroyasha”), for his mastery of the sword and fierceness in combat.

Personality

Gintoki is an extremely lazy person. He can often be seen with a dumb expression on his face as well as spending his days reading Shounen Jump magazine, mouthing the advice of his Yorozui staff, though he himself does not know what he is saying most of the time. Because of his poverty and unwillingness to do much of anything, he is always standing on his rent and often runs away when Otose, his landlady, comes to collect the payment. He often plops down all his savings on Pachinko and other gambling, for which Shinpachi and Kagura often scold him. However, despite being lazy, Gintoki is fully dedicated to his work and tries to help people using all of himself (usually in a very strange and twisted way).

Gintoki’s past continues to influence who he is and what he does. Gintoki tells Umiboz in episode 42 that: “I’m not sure, but when you have a father who takes care of you…what more do you need? Honestly, I wish I had a father like you. Isn’t that funny? A man deprived of something… understands it better than anyone.”

He has great respect for his teacher Yoshida Shoyo because of his actions (his teacher’s imprisonment is one of the main reasons he joined Joey’s war, and another is to protect his friends who also joined the war). When Jiraiya called himself Tsukuyo’s teacher and yet inflicted both emotional and physical pain on her, his ideal of a teacher caused Gintoki to become angry and take his anger out on Jiraiya.

His failure to protect many of his friends in the Joy War still haunts him, especially the crushing guilt and regret that consumed him when Tendoshu forced him to execute his own teacher in front of Takasugi and Katsura. As a result, he is very appreciative and protective of his current friends and very little appreciative of his own life. This carelessness can be seen when Gintoki is able to make his way through the army without fatigue, indifferent to the serious injuries he sustained while knocking out his enemies. He told Kawakami Bansai, during the Shinsengumi Farewell Arch, that the only reason he fought in the Joy War was to protect his friends, not his country or his bushido.

More comical stories portray Gintoki as a coward, trying to abandon many of his friends to save his life. Nevertheless, he is willing to risk his life for everyone, and it proves to them that he cares very much for his friends, killing members of Naraku, the terrorists, and Amanto to protect them. He is very afraid of ghosts, but usually refuses their existence so he doesn’t look like a coward. His fear of the supernatural is shared by Hijikata and usually leads to some rather comical interactions between the two.

He has many childlike character traits, despite his age, and has even described himself as “a child in a man’s body.” One such trait is his insatiable love of candy, which brought him close to the risk of getting diabetes several times over. His favorite food is chocolate parfait, and he likes to drink strawberry milk whenever he can get it.

He likes alcohol, but his tolerance for sake is not great. At one point, his tendency to act like a complete idiot while completely drunk led the main female characters Otose, Shimura Tae, Kyubei, Sarutobi Ayame and Tsukuyo to decide to teach him a lesson by playing a prank on him along with Zenzu during Scandal Arc.

Gintoki does not seem to like his curly hair, claiming in Episode 5 that his lack of girlfriends is due to his hair.

Gintoki – has a complicated relationship with girls. Although several female characters have shown interest in Gintoki, such as Shimura Tae, Sarutobi Ayame and Tsukuyo, it is shown that most of their love is unrequited. Nevertheless, he is in love with the weather girl, Ketsuno Ana, and he once declared that he wanted to marry her (perhaps because of her smile). While Gintoki doesn’t seem to care about any woman he knows, he still gets excited when he sees random beautiful women, such as when he spied pool women with binoculars and got very excited until he recognized the woman he was interested in was Tsukuyo. When he realized this, he lost all interest, saying that Tsukuyo was a “drunken terminator.” He was also flustered when he saw a girl with “big breasts,” not realizing that it was actually Kyubei.