Before I paste the character: DON'T read all of the background, seriously. Not only is it excessively long but it also contains some rather detailed information about brain damage and such, which is overkill. The soul society part will do for anyone who doesn't want to read complex stuff. =P
Name: Osamu Akira Nishimura
Age at the time of death: 17
Years in Soul Society: 199
Visual age: Of a man in his twenties.
Years since Entrance into the Gotei 13: 57
Gender: Male
Division: 11
Rank: Regular, 3nd seat, with no desire to ascend.
Appearance:
(As soon as I get my hands on a scanner I'll add a picture of Osamu's facial characteristics, but his build I will attend to here;)
Osamu is a rather short, lightly built man with the physical appearance that corresponds with that of an approximately twenty-year old. His light statue doesn't really show because in his rather short period with the Gotei 13 he has been dedicated to the work and trained hard. In contrast to many of his fellow squad members Osamu was on a different schedule for training from the beginning due to his zampaktou not being a katana but a shorter, straight blade. This made it easier to differentiate his other exercices also, and for the past years Osamu has been practising a series of rather uncommon styles.
Doesn't everyone try to live that way? Why yes, they do, but being socially chalanged it is only of recent years that Osamu actually made some friends and had to make time free for what can generally be regarded as 'fun' activities.
Robes and clothing are conform the standard regulations, although his Hakama is sleeveless to allow quicker movements. The zampaktou is carried in a scabbard, bound to his right thigh, and is drawn with the left hand.
Personality:
There are two important things about Osamu. First of all he looks absolutely normal, with this I mean that he friendlily greets you on the streets, he laughs at a good joke and expresses his thoughts sarcastically if the situation seems appropriate. This means that in all general activities it is easy to start a conversation with Osamu, he’ll give his opinion when asked for it (Alright, occasionally also when not asked, but who doesn’t?) and lends a hand if needed. However, now, I sadly now have to add a second characteristic of Osamu.
Osamu Nishimura is crazy. Yes he is, but with that I don’t mean he has split personalities, an unstable mind or is a masochist, don’t get me wrong.
Osamu has trouble with emotions, better said: He hardly has them, and anger in particular, but the problem also concerns affection. Rarely has he had friends, really cared for his parents or been angry with his brother for breaking a ‘special’ toy when he was little. Not once did he fall in love, nor did Osamu recognise the first girl who fell for him. In his life on earth as a mortal he never received therapies simply because his parents didn’t see the need for it until the school started to make trouble. (Which will be attended to in the background story.)
At school Osamu worked hard and he could get a long with pretty much everyone, even if he didn’t really care for them. Something else was that he wasn’t aggressive and soon learnt to recognise the emotions he so rarely felt in others by simply studying people’s behaviour.
Even though Osamu is this way, this does not make him stand out. Occasionally of course he’ll try to change the subject of conversation or give an odd answer but unless you provoke it you won't notice much. In everyday life there aren’t many problems to be found either, Osamu is dedicated to the jobs and hobbies he has, and can still enjoy a victory in sports or witty remark.
Fighting Style:
Osamu fights in a close-combat oriented way. His main focus is to combine speed with a set of attacks that are all directed at reducing the opponent's mobility. This is achieved by either aiming for tendons, transversal strikes at muscle or exploitation of his zampaktou's electrical properties. About the latter it must be said that rather than inflicting severe physical injurry the electrical charges released by his blade generally target the better conducting tissue, that being the nerves, causing depending on their power something between paralysis and specific neuronal death. To acheve this there are several styles Osamu can use, each with different potencies, practical value, etc. Specifics can be found in the zampaktou description.
Background in the real world:
We’ll start when Osamu was fifteen years old, two years previous to his departure from the realm of the living.
At that time Osamu still classified as a not all too weird schoolboy, perhaps standing out more because of his school grades rather than the psychological problems he had. The school was informed and even some of his classmates knew he wasn’t completely ‘normal’. If they cared at all they sure did not show it, why bother anyway? It was practically impossible to start a row with him, he was helpful and good at sports. Even if he had psychological problems, they figured, it was probably a depression or some inferiority problems that all Japanese students to a degree suffered from.
The evil-doers in Osamu’s life were the school’s staff. They hadn't intended their actions to be fatal to him but occasionally you just can't see a storm coming.
As one of the better students of his school Osamu also was one of the well known ones and the schools psychologist, who he had never seen, one day got her hands on his medical file. Curious as she was she started researching the amygdala-trauma described and tried to figure out what the consequences would be to someone who had suffered such injuries.
Already displaying a certain level of incompetence she was forced to consult a physician because she herself couldn’t quite figure the problem out. The physician soon contacted her with an explanation of the potential psychological problems involved. Also, he suggested that if she had a pupil with such problems she might want to enter him into a clinical trial for a vague drug that, in theory, would compensate for the loss of amygdalic function.
The psychologist spoke to the school board and they in turn convinced the Nishimura household to enter their one and only son into the testing. They did so reluctantly as Osamu thus far hadn’t had any trouble getting along but school board members tend to be persuasive, starting the “long-term psychological problems can still arise” and “At this young age we can still influence his developing brain” kind of arguments that parents are so terribly susceptible to.
Osamu was now receiving half a meal worth of drugs every week and it didn’t take long for the effects to kick in. He started to get trouble sleeping at first but slowly also mood swings and aggression developed, coming in unexpected and uncontrollable waves. There were days that just the weather already triggered a complete fit of anger but also moments remained that even an assassin couldn’t provoke him.
Making matters worse the stress of exams that he had never felt now tore his mind apart, dropping his grades back to a miserable average. This on itself wasn’t all too bad but to his parents it was the reason to withdraw him from the treatments. Deprived of the drugs it was now withdrawal that assaulted his already weakened mind.
Just over his seventeenth birthday Osamu was walking back from school in the late autumn sunshine. The smell of wet leaves and the warming stands of light helped subdue some of the headache that wouldn’t leave him alone for a solid month now. Emotions, as he had decided, were all fine and cool if OTHER people had them. Why the bloody treatment that had left him like this? No reason, just to be ‘normal’? No, he decided, he would be happy or better said: content, in his own way, no drugs needed.
Walking down the street and taking one of the staircases downhill he took a good look around. It was the same old route he had gone a thousand times already, yet it was good to see it again after all of last year’s chaotic events. ‘At least’ He thought; ‘this is a constant, something reliable and of variable beauty. God, that damn headache..!’
While he rounded another corner onto a sidewalk Osamu found himself accidentally walking right into a group of wannabe-gangsters. They were the type of eighteen-year-olds that think they're fantastic because together with four friends they can get a way with bullying. These not-so-great youths saw a young sixteen-year-old walking right into their group and decided at once that this was too good an opportunity not to scare the hell out of him.
They blocked Osamu’s way and stood around him threateningly, someone already drawing a knife but it all didn’t seem to have the desired effect. The kid wasn’t scared at all, rather, he seemed to pay no attention to them at all. The truth was of course that Osamu was preoccupied by feeling like having a burning log shoved into your head, one trough each of his temples. Suddenly receiving a shove from the biggest, proudest and by chance also ugliest of the guys didn’t help at all either.
The headache turned into anger and in a moment of complete absence of mind Osamu slung the guy onto the road where the traffic made short work his life. It wasn't intentional and only by chance had there been some traffic but that didn't matter anymore. The other four jumped on top of him and even before Osamu hit the ground two knives dug themselves into his back. The world went dark before his eyes.
Osamu was found, still breathing, as a pile of bloody human waste on that very same sidewalk and an ambulance even got him to the hospital in time. He didn’t live long, the continuous strain on his heart of the drugs he had been taking proved him fatal, his heart tried to compensate for the blood loss by increasing its frequency but just couldn’t keep up. The ‘helping’ treatment provoked the attack and also finished it. Not that anyone ever knew what had happened.
In the hospital Osamu’s spirit was found, sitting in a corner looking at his own body lying torn in front of him. He looked at the lot with interest, his subconsciousness playing with the five remaining shackles of chain that protruded from his chest. The shinigami that found him fist thought that he was in shock but as Osamu turned and smiled at him the deathgod was at a loss for words.
‘Don’t be surprised please, I can cope with things rather well.’ Osamu commented on the look on the stunned shinigami, who now tried to conceal his thoughts with a clumsy smile before remembering he was there for a purpose. (Admittedly, Osamu was in an exceptionally good mood as all withdrawal symptoms had disappeared.)
‘Ah,’ His voice still matched the shinigami’s previous expression. ‘You know, I'm here to send you to the afterlife. The sooner the better..’
‘You are? Excellent! However interesting I find it here, the thought of looking at myself does seem a little off. Send me on my way, ill be alright.’
Osamu smiled.
The shinigami frowned. But he did send him off with a steady pound on the forehead, walking away afterwards muttering something about that ‘weird kid’ and ‘as if the day hadn't been strange enough already’.
Thus, Osamu Nishimara entered Soul Society.
Background in Soul Society:
The rebirth in Soul Society most likely was the best thing that ever happened to Osamu Nishimura. Being raised in a new family that also recognised his behaviour as odd but that taught him social skills appropriately it wasn't surprising that Osamu turned out even better than he initially had in the real world.
As a child he had few friends but got along really well with them all, as well as with his family. People accepted the fact that he was less emotional than most others and treated him as any other, improving his state of mind even further. When the scouts of the shinigami-academy found this fragile, temperless boy they had heard about they thought that, with his riatsu, he would most likely be a protective kidou-user when he graduated. They were quite wrong.
On the academy Osamu had no affection for any of the kidou types but the few lightning typed ones they learned and being agile, acute and both left- and right-handed he quickly became a valued opponent in kendo and kenjutsu. (This was before Osamu first achieved shikai, which resulted in his unreleased zampaktou changing in the straight short-sword it is now.)
When still at the academy Osamu leaned towards applying for a position on the Onmitsukidō and several of his instructors supported him at it. However it still took a while before they accepted to see whether Osamu was of the right Onmitsukidō-calibre and from there on every spare moment he had was spent on practising flash step, wakazashi use and the obligated kidou-basics. Ignoring his poor performance on kidou Osamu eventually was accepted into the squad where he spent twenty rather successful years based on swordsmanship and speed.
Following his rather short stay at the Onmitsukidō Osamu joined the eleventh squad upon request, taking a low-ranking seat initially. Over the years he at first grew in rank before reaching a plateau where he stuck at the 8th seat, from where his achieving of shikai also meant he decisively took the 3rd seat as his own. Exactly how potent Osamu's power is isn't really known, he hasn't been a shinigami for long yet and because he does not desire a officers ranking it was easy to hide the specifics of his abilities.
If there is anything I have to edit, please tell me.
Wed Jan 02, 2013 5:26 am by 
