Sakura Kawasugi

Sakura Kawasugi (河杉 さくら Kawasugi Sakura) is a second year student at Onoze Middle School and a member of their mahjong club.

Appearance
Sakura has pink hair and green eyes. As an elementary school student she had short hair that she let grow. She is 149 cm tall during her second year in middle school.

Matsuse Children Tournament
Sakura, at that time a 6th year elementary school student, plays the first game of the 11th Matsue Children's Mahjong Tournament against Shino Shiratsuki and places second. Both girls promise to play against each other again in the future.

City Tournament Arc
Two years later, Sakura is the lieutenant of Onoze Middle School's mahjong team and plays against Shino, Aina Moriwaki, and Kano Itou. She arrives to the playing hall surprised and mentions to everyone that Shino was 3rd overall in the elementary tournaments.

At the start of the match, she mentions the promise made to Shino and says that she never thought they'd actually meet again and that she is happy to see her. Aina Moriwaki then proceeds to win three straight rounds. In the next round, Sakura hesitates a little then decides to call riichi. She mentions that calling riichi by herself makes her anxious and feels like she's just going to lose to Aina again. She is then thrilled when Shino decides to call riichi herself and surprised when Kano calls riichi as well. The round ends in a draw with only Aina not in tenpai. In the next round, she builds her hand and call riichi but Shino immediately calls one of her discards and shortly wins the round with a tsumo.

In the following hand, Sakura discards Shino's winning tile, allowing her to get closer to Aina in points, but dropping Sakura further down. In the next few hands, Sakura ends up losing more points to exhaustive draws and tsumos, until he only has 8,900 points remaining at the start of the South round. However, upon opening her hand, she sees that she has 10 types of tiles for a kokushi and a pair for it, meaning she's only one tile away from a kokushi tenpai. About 8 turns in, she tsumos, with Aina as the dealer, Sakura jumps straight into first place.

The next two hands turn into a slug fest between Shino and Aina, with both of them winning one hand each. In her final dealership, and the last hand of the game, Sakura discards the dora-east, thinking she wouldn't need it, allowing Aina to call it. Shino joins in, and both of them quickly gather two calls each. Sakura considers playing into Shino's open hand, thinking it's only a sanshoku, worth 1000 points, allowing Sakura to keep first and prevent Manbara from taking it again. However, Sakura then remembers that a sanshopo is still possible, and that dealing into that would let Yumachi take first again. Sakura manages to reach tenpai, for a 3-way pinfu wait, and sees that Kano had earlier discarded the 9-sou, the tile that allows Sakura to reach the best tenpai, causing her to also discard the 9-sou. Aina then rons off of Sakura's 9-sou, allowing Manbara to take first place again, for a total of 2 out of the 3 times.

Playing Style/Abilities
According to Shino Shiratsuki, Sakura's style was centered around closed hands. While playing against Aina Moriwaki, Sakura tried her hardest to gather as many points as fast as possible, either by calling tiles or declaring fast riichi's, but unfortunately, she couldn't out speed Aina or Shino. In the 1st South hand, Sakura saw the opportunity for a kokushi (having 10 tiles, and one pair), and went for it, eventually allowing her to tsumo, and overtake Aina at the top.

Etymology

 * Sakura's surname Kawasugi means "river" (河) (kawa) and "cedar" (杉) (sugi).