Sakura Kashima

Sakura Kashima加島 桜
Gender	Female
Hair Color	Gray
Eye Color	Violet
Affiliation	Gaia (Holy Woman)
Voice Actor	Naomi Wakabayashi

Sakura Kashima (加島 桜 Kashima Sakura) is the main antagonist of Akane Route of Rewrite. She is the adopted mother of Akane Senri when her orphanage closed down. Akane is recognized by the school and given high power, due to the power of her adopted mother Kashima.

Appearance

She is described at being an old woman, over seventy years old in Terra and thus over eighty in the other routes, with long gray hair, and violet hollow eyes that show no signs of life. She wears western clothes which consist of a pink dress-shirt covered from the arms down by a purple robe.

In Terra, her fingernails are purple, she wears a pearl necklace around her neck and a emerald class-ring on her finger.

Personality

Sakura is the current Holy Woman of Gaia in much of Rewrite's timeline. Though she rarely appears throughout the entire story of Rewrite it is revealed that Sakura hates "Life" itself. Sakura is very smart, clever, and manipulative; she can easily guess what other people are thinking and when speaking to a person, she asks normal questions but includes hidden messages and questions that let her decipher who that person truly is; superhuman or summoner. Her high intellect became her downfall as she realized that 'Life' was pointless and that 'Love' was a lie but failed to realize that love is responsible for everything. She wants to use the Key's power to wipe out all life on earth, but her actions go beyond that as she sends familiars to the Moon Route  of the story in order to kill the Moon Kagari who is searching for a way to not only restore humanity, but also lead it into a future where both humanity and the Earth can survive.

Synopsis

Past

Ten years prior to the current events of Rewrite, Sakura called Kotarou to meet with her under his parents' request (Though that's probably a lie). Sakura asks Kotarou about the troubles in his life, but she includes hidden messages like "strange creature, secrets, can't tell anyone" which emphasizes that she knows about his activities in the forest. At the end of their conversation she concludes that he is a wild-one (a superhuman but not a part of Guardian).

Akane Route

Sakura appears before Kotarou in Akane's Route, she is seemingly too ill enough to speak and is carried back to her room by her attendants. She is later poisoned by Takasago and killed.

Moon Route

Sakura has familiars sent to the Moon in order to kill the Moon Kagari and prevent Life from happening on earth. Though her army of familiars manage to wipe out the members of the Occult Research Society and The Wolf Pack that protect Kagari; her plan ultimately fails as the Moon Kagari begins absorbing her familiars into her theory and supplying the omnipotent power to the Earth.

Terra Route

After the Moon Kagari changes Kotarou's future by implanting her theory onto the earth, Sakura interviews Kotarou (Though he is acting as a double-agent and goes by the name of Suzuki) before her joins Gaia; she finds nothing out of the ordinary with him and lets him join Gaia under the direction of Suzaki. Much later in the route, Sakura has another meeting with Suzuki/Kotarou where they discuss his actions why she helped him. (Suzaki was planning to have Akane and Tsukuno killed in order to prevent there from being another holy woman, but Kotarou sent a message to Sakura using a familiar to inform her of his plan). Sakura had traced the contract of the familiar which is how she found out who sent it. She corners Suzuki/Kotarou by asking if her knows Akane or Tsukuno; but she calls Tsukuno by her real name which is Nagai. She agrees to protect Akane and Tsukuno in exchange for him helping her, but to be careful in the future; due to her being so clever, she'll be able to predict what he'll do next.

Sakura and her disciples go to the top of Gaia's main structure where they sing the Song of Destruction that forces the Earth Kagari to evoke salvation. When Kotarou attempts to head into the structure, they summon the Earth Dragon to block his path; he manages to defeat it without much trouble, but she and her disciples had used up all of their life-force controlling the dragon.

Harvest festa!

In the "fan box" (a term for a supplementary game consisting of a few different routes of dubious canonicity), Kagari finds a rare world in which the supernatural does not exist whatsoever. In this world, Sakura is still the head of Gaia, but Gaia is now just an environmental activist group; she has also adopted Akane and is not an enemy.

Arnaments

• The Disciples: Sakura can will the summoners of Gaia who serve her to do anything they want, to the point that they will die for her.
• Poisonous Familiars: In the Moon Route she has familiars that have an acidic blood that is able to burn flesh and eat away at Kotarou's aurora as well as Kagari's ribbons.
• Exploding Familiars: Some of the familiars that she has explode when they are killed, causing damage to everything around them.

Abilities

• Transcription: As the Holy Woman, she seemingly can heal people's physical and mental defects, but she is actually making a slight contract with the dead parts of their body.

Etymology

• The name Sakura means "cherry blossom" (桜).
• Sakura's surname Kashima means "add, increase" (加) (ka) and "island" (島) (shima).

Trivia

• Sakura is the oldest character in Rewrite.
• As mentioned by Kotarou, Sakura's eyes seemingly glowed when she interrogated him.
• As stated by Akane, the dinosaurs in her familiar army are made of old fossils that she has collected from around the world.
• The poisonous blood that flows through some of her familiars may be the poison's gas that is said to be released from the Earth when all of its resources are used up and it dies, as mentioned by Lucia. The gas devours life, which is why it could eat through Kagari's ribbons and Kotarou's aurora, which are the very essences of life.
• It is possible that the world in which the Sakura Kashima that sends familiars to kill the Moon Kagari is already destroyed.
• Sakura probably dies in any route chosen.
• Sakura is so smart that she probably found away to enter the Peak of Existence that Kotarou entered in the Moon Route, but stopped her quest for knowledge when she realized that love was a lie and so she tried to end all possiblities of life by killing the Moon Kagari.
• After Sakura realized the truths of the world, the power to create Holy Women seems to have been damaged in some way, as Akane and Shimako do not have the will to destroy the world in the Terra Route after her death.

Gallery

Kashima in Terra Route

Kashima as portrayed in the TV Anime

brief appearance in the Terra Arc OP