AIHARA

A newly-arrived pilot.
Yuuichi watches him fold his newspaper and is reminded of Aizu Yudagawa who died earlier in the movie who used to fold his newspaper the exact same way. Aihara’s way of folding his newspaper is a physical marker, but it is only when Yuuichi makes the connection between this mannerism of this new pilot’s and the same mannerism exhibited by another absent pilot that he uses the same language to arrive at the possibility that he is the same as Jinroh. In this sense, he finds and creates himself through a visual language, recalling fragments of memories of past lives, consolidating them and forming a more unified sense of self than he had before.