Yoshiyuki Sadamoto
5The Turn · 77貞本 義行
Born 1962
The character designer of Neon Genesis Evangelion, who also drew its manga.
5A 5 by its name: freedom seeker, and therefore the turn.
Career
Yoshiyuki Sadamoto was born in 1962. He was one of the founding members of the animation studio Gainax, and designed characters for its first feature, Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise (1987), and for Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water.
The work
He designed the characters of Neon Genesis Evangelion and drew its manga from 1994 to 2013. He has also designed characters for films including The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2006) and Summer Wars (2009).
The style
Sadamoto's characters are slender, expressive and natural, with an elegance that set the look of 1990s anime. In manga he gives more room to his characters' inner lives than the anime did.
Why he matters
His designs for Shinji, Rei and Asuka are among the most influential in anime, and his manga is a key alternative telling of Evangelion.
The name by its numbers
The arithmetic is unremarkable and worth doing anyway: 77 across 2 words, reducing to 5. The weight sits in “Yoshiyuki”, which carries 52 on its own and reduces to 7.
What the 5 brings is change. The reference files it as a turn. Whatever else this entry is doing, it is doing it with the 5's restlessness and hunger for change.
Heart's Desire 5, Personality 9: the presentation folds back into the want: reckoning in service of change.
The letters give 5; the subject's own figures do not agree. 人格 core is 18, a 9, 総格 total is 33 and born is 1962, a 9. Where the two part company the reference trusts the figures, because the romanisation is a convenience for readers abroad, while the strokes are what the pen name was actually built from.
The 5 asks you to ask what was abandoned, and whether it deserved to be. The 5 moves for the sake of moving. Not every break documented here led anywhere, and the reference says so where it did not. The other entries that reduce to 5 are collected on The Turn.