Shouichi Makise#
| Public alias | "Doctor Nakabachi" |
| Field | Theoretical physics (time-structure) |
| Daughter | Kurisu Makise |
| Former post | Tokyo Denki University (dismissed 2003) |
| Known for | The Radio Kaikan conference, July 28 2010 |
| Claimed work | A time-machine theory (authorship disputed — see below) |
| Patron (Beta) | A foreign state program, via intermediaries |
| Status | Worldline-dependent; at large (Beta) |
Shouichi Makise, publishing in disgrace under the alias Nakabachi, is a failed theoretical physicist, the father of Kurisu Makise, and — on the Beta worldline — the man whose stolen conference papers ignite World War III. He is the story's only true villain in the domestic sense of the word: SERN is an institution, but Nakabachi is just a man who could not forgive his own daughter for surpassing him.
His early career was genuinely distinguished — his mid-90s work on closed timelike curves is still cited, and taught Kurisu her first physics at the dinner table.1 The decline began when the field moved past him and his daughter did not stop moving with it. By 2003 he had been dismissed from his university post; by 2010 the alias, the debts, and the venue-rate conference bookings had consumed what remained of the name Makise.
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 1992 | Marries; Kurisu born the following year |
| 1996 | Publishes his highest-cited paper |
| 2001 | First public priority dispute — against a 8-year-old Kurisu's notebook, per family accounts |
| 2003 | Dismissed from Tokyo Denki University |
| 2005 | Adopts the Nakabachi alias; family separates |
| 2010-07-28 | The Radio Kaikan conference (episode-01) |
| 2010-11 | Defects with the stolen thesis (Beta) |
This section spoils the opening and the ending of the entire series. The same afternoon, in the same building, is the story's first scene and its last battlefield. Proceed accordingly, or begin with episode-01.
On Beta-line branches, the argument in the Radio Kaikan ends with Kurisu bleeding out on the eighth floor — the body Okabe finds in the story's opening minutes. Nakabachi flees with her time-travel thesis to sell abroad; the paper's contents, developed by a state program over the following decades, produce the war that Suzuha's future is fleeing. Every attempt Okabe makes to save Kurisu without addressing the paper fails: the Steins Gate solution finally threads the needle by ensuring the thesis burns while the world — and Nakabachi himself — believes his daughter died anyway. Operation Skuld's cruelest requirement is that the lie must include the liar.
The thesis Nakabachi carries out of the Radio Kaikan is Kurisu's work — written in her notation, on her problem, extending her time-leap results. His marginal annotations, recovered on one branch, amount to renaming variables. The wiki records the paper under her authorship and files his claim where it belongs: in the long, sour tradition catalogued at List of scientific priority disputes.
Fandom shorthand calls him "Doctor Nakabachi," but no institution on any worldline has ever verified the doctorate post-2003. The title is part of the alias. #lore
A minor embarrassment on the conference circuit. With SERN monopolizing time-travel research, his stolen-thesis gambit has no buyer, and Alpha branches simply forget him — the fate he feared more than any prison.
The war's accidental author. Defects via a Russian intermediary in November 2010; last confirmed sighting is an airport camera frame that Daru pulls in episode-23.
The thesis burns in the Radio Kaikan with the world watching a different story. He leaves the building with an empty envelope and a live daughter, convinced of the opposite on both counts.
What makes Nakabachi durable as a villain is his scale. He has no organization, no Committee, no ideology — only a wounded vanity with a twenty-year head start. SERN needed a global conspiracy to nearly end the world; he nearly ends it with a manila envelope. The contrast is the point, and the reason his page sits here among People rather than beside SERN in Category: Organizations.
Footnotes#
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Kurisu's own account, related in episode-22: the last time physics was something they did together she was seven. She kept the notebook. ↩