Saku Hashira

Saku Hashira (柱 佐久, Hashira Saku) is a male that is highly renowned for his mastery of. He is the head master of the Hashira Dojo and serves as the representative of. Within the martial arts community, even among other masters, Saku is respected as the primary authority of Hakuda in the, with many martial artists stating that he has reached the pinnacle of Hakuda and stands on that precipice together with. As one of the greatest masters of Hakuda within, Saku holds a position as one of. Among them, he bears the trigram designation of ☰ (乾, Qián) — carrying the title "Ascending Fist".

Personality
When Saku was still adapting to the role of an instructor and the job of teaching the martial arts to his students, he was noted as being remarkably kind and joyous. His goal was to create "good students" through Hakuda. In other words, students that would be respectful and honorable against their opponents; never fighting to kill, but simply to render the opponent incapable of causing harm. It's possible to say that Saku, early on, was a proponent of the life-giving fist. His students looked up to him as a father figure and he, in turn, saw every one of his students as his children. Saku was far more easy-going in the past, even allowing his students to take the day off from training if they managed to land a single hit on him in a sparring match. That being said, he was an excellent instructor. No matter how difficult the lesson or how advanced the maneuver, Saku always found a way to teach an individual how to master the task. He didn't see his class as a group of students but rather paid attention to each student; being capable of understanding their behavior, strengths, weaknesses, and ultimately their potential. Saku was a genius at being able to understand a person and even read them to the point where some even construed it as mind-reading. Ultimately, Saku kept to the goal of instilling kindness and a good heart in his students. However, that all changed when he learned that his star pupils were killed by vagabonds in the Rukongai. He learned from witnesses that his students tried multiple times to reason with the bandits and even gave them opportunities to run away, but that left them vulnerable when the bandits took advantage of their kindness and killed all of them in cold blood.

This event tore apart Saku's paradigm of the right way to teach students. He reasoned that it was his fault for his students being killed because he spent too much time teaching them to be good people rather than strong warriors. If they were strong instead of good, then they would still be alive. Because of his weakness, his students had to die. That was how Saku understood the situation. He abandoned his old ways, even to the point of tearing down his old school building, which served as a symbol of his weakness, and began to teach at a new school. Saku's focus shifted toward training strong students. His methods became brutal and even vicious, often pitting his students against each other so that the competition would strengthen their resolve. Despite his newfound methods, however, the effectiveness was never lost. Among the network of schools in the Rukongai, even among the students of the other Eight Sage Fists, Saku's students are regarded as the best Hakuda practitioners. However, it should be noted that Saku is more than willing to let his students kill other students if it means they can be pushed to improve and become stronger via competition and a need for survival. He views this as the only way to ensure that his students will not die pointless and meaningless deaths, like his students from back in the day.

Behind the Scenes
The basis for this character was inspired by Gakuhō Asano from the manga and anime series, Assassination Classroom. He is voiced by Shō Hayami, the seiyū that also voices. Saku is meant to serve as a rival to, not in terms of fighting skill, but rather in terms of teaching. They are both regarded as the top of the Hakuda field, as both practitioners and mentors, but they have their own individual philosophies when it comes to how to teach their students.