TV-Series
Description
Professor Kakuzawa Yu is a supporting antagonist in the anime Elfen Lied. He is a scientist connected to the Diclonius Research Institute and a university professor who, by coincidence, lectures a course attended by Kouta and Yuka, two of the story's central human characters. Kakuzawa is the son of Chief Kakuzawa, the director of the research facility, and, like his father, he was born with small horn-like protrusions on his head but no telekinetic vectors. The family believed these vestigial horns were evidence of Diclonius ancestry, a bloodline that had become diluted through generations of interbreeding with ordinary humans. In his mid-thirties, Kakuzawa hides his horns under a brown wig, and he has brown eyes and a light stubble of beard. His outwardly friendly and carefree manner allows him to blend into human society and maintain his cover as an ordinary academic.
Beneath that pleasant surface, Kakuzawa is arrogant and cold, holding ordinary humans in contempt and regarding them as inferior. He shares his father's ambition of replacing humanity with the Diclonius, whom he considers the superior new race, and he believed his own family were descendants of the early Diclonius who had lost their powers. Because Lucy, the Diclonius queen, was the first of her kind capable of reproduction, the Kakuzawas aimed to use her to replenish their diluted bloodline and to rule the new Diclonius world as its kings. This long-term ambition shaped Kakuzawa's key actions in the story: three years after Lucy was captured and held at the research facility, it was Kakuzawa who laid the plan that enabled her escape, an act intended to further the family's agenda rather than to protect her.
His role in the story is that of a schemer and antagonist. During his university days he studied alongside Kurama, the facility official who later becomes a central figure in the Diclonius project, and it was Kakuzawa who first drew Kurama into Diclonius research. His position as a lecturer at the university places him in the same environment as Kouta and Yuka and links the everyday world of the main characters to the secretive research on the Diclonius. As the story progresses, his true nature and goals are gradually exposed, and he works toward his family's plan until he comes into direct opposition with Lucy.
Kakuzawa's notable abilities are intellectual rather than physical. As a diluted Diclonius he has vestigial horns but no vectors, so his effectiveness as an antagonist comes from his scientific expertise, his capacity for manipulation, and the deceptive cover provided by his academic identity.
Beneath that pleasant surface, Kakuzawa is arrogant and cold, holding ordinary humans in contempt and regarding them as inferior. He shares his father's ambition of replacing humanity with the Diclonius, whom he considers the superior new race, and he believed his own family were descendants of the early Diclonius who had lost their powers. Because Lucy, the Diclonius queen, was the first of her kind capable of reproduction, the Kakuzawas aimed to use her to replenish their diluted bloodline and to rule the new Diclonius world as its kings. This long-term ambition shaped Kakuzawa's key actions in the story: three years after Lucy was captured and held at the research facility, it was Kakuzawa who laid the plan that enabled her escape, an act intended to further the family's agenda rather than to protect her.
His role in the story is that of a schemer and antagonist. During his university days he studied alongside Kurama, the facility official who later becomes a central figure in the Diclonius project, and it was Kakuzawa who first drew Kurama into Diclonius research. His position as a lecturer at the university places him in the same environment as Kouta and Yuka and links the everyday world of the main characters to the secretive research on the Diclonius. As the story progresses, his true nature and goals are gradually exposed, and he works toward his family's plan until he comes into direct opposition with Lucy.
Kakuzawa's notable abilities are intellectual rather than physical. As a diluted Diclonius he has vestigial horns but no vectors, so his effectiveness as an antagonist comes from his scientific expertise, his capacity for manipulation, and the deceptive cover provided by his academic identity.