List of Gin Tama Characters - Creation and Conception

Creation and Conception

Before the start from Gin Tama's serialization, Hideaki Sorachi wrote various one-shot manga. Although he considered the story Samuraider very poor, the setting of such one-shot served as the base for Gin Tama such as the addition of alien characters. While thinking of the name of a manga, Sorachi's editor commented "Do you think a silver samurai would be cool?" That inspirated Sorachi to write the main character from the series after deciding the series should be named Gin Tama. However, the main character was originally meant to be Hijikata Toushiro as Sorachi was a fan of the Shinsengumi, most notably Hijikata Toshizō (the Shinsengumi who was the base for the one of Gin Tama), after he saw Burn! Sword!. When Sorachi could not "shake off" Hijikata's initial design, he decided not to use him as the lead character, but added him along with the Shinsengumi to the story. The pilot chapter from the series had a different plot to the one from the serialization: Sorachi kept adding Shinsengumi to the story such as Harada Sanosuke. As all of these characters were older than most of the recurring ones from the series, Sorachi removed them thinking they were not entertaining. When asked by a fan if all the characters from the series were based on Real-Edo life citizens, Sorachi responded he was right and mentioned that Gintoki was roughly based on Sakata Kintoki, but added that he did not mean to make Gintoki a descendant from Sakata. Regarding character designs, Sorachi stated that all the characters' faces are based on Shinpachi as by just making a few changes such as modifying his hair a little and removing his glasses, people will get different characters from the manga. Sorachi has stated that he has liked all the characters he designed and whenever a character has been absent from the manga for various chapters, he tries to make him return. On the other hand, when a character appears too often, he does not want to make him star for the next chapters. However, he states that such "cycle" does not apply to the Yorozuya trio.