Yuugo Tennouji#
| Known as | Mr. Braun |
| Occupation | Owner, Braun Tsuushin CRT shop |
| Covert role | Rounder handler "FB" (Alpha) |
| Daughter | Nae Tennouji |
| Descendant | Suzuha Amane (via a son born post-2010) |
| Tenant | Future Gadget Lab (second floor) |
| Height | 190 cm |
| Build | Ex-wrestler, and it shows |
| Temper | Short; volume: legendary |
| Status | Worldline-dependent |
Yuugo Tennouji — universally "Mr. Braun," after the inventor of the CRT he refuses to stop selling — is the landlord of the building that houses the Future Gadget Lab, a single father to Nae, and the loudest fixture of the Akihabara backstreet the lab calls home. He bellows at Okabe about the rent, the noise, and the microwave that keeps browning out his shop's power, roughly in that order, roughly daily.
On the Alpha worldline he is also FB — the Rounders handler who has been running Moeka Kiryu for years from the floor directly beneath the lab he was assigned to watch.
Braun Tsuushin sells and repairs cathode-ray tube televisions exclusively, a business model that stopped making sense around 2003 and that Tennouji defends with the zeal of a man who is either a romantic or laundering something.1 The truth is a little of both: the shop is real, the love of the technology is real, and the shop is also how SERN pays him.
He took the work for one reason. Nae's medical bills after her mother's death would have ended the shop, and SERN's recruiter — as SERN's recruiters reliably do — arrived within a week of the funeral with exactly the right number on a piece of paper.
Everything below the fold here is an Alpha-line spoiler, and it is the big one for this character. See episode-19 before reading.
As FB, Tennouji ran Moeka through text messages composed on an old phone he kept taped under the shop counter — close enough to the lab's Phone Microwave that at least one D-Mail is believed to have shifted a worldline while sitting in his outbox. He never met her face to face until the day the arrangement collapsed, and by every recovered account he had come to think of her, with genuine and useless tenderness, as a second daughter.
When SERN ordered him to cut her loose, he obeyed — the same way he had obeyed for eleven years, because obedience was the price of Nae's future. The scene where Okabe confronts him is played almost without anger: two men who both know exactly what SERN costs, itemized.
| Person | Relation |
|---|---|
| Nae Tennouji | Daughter; the reason for everything |
| Suzuha Amane | His part-timer — and, unknown to both, his future granddaughter |
| Rintaro Okabe | Tenant, headache, and eventually something like a son |
| Moeka Kiryu | Asset, codename M4 (Alpha only) |
| Mayuri Shiina | The one lab member he is never loud with |
The Suzuha connection means Tennouji's bloodline is load-bearing for the entire Steins Gate endgame — a fact precisely zero people in 2010 are equipped to appreciate. The wiki files him under People rather than Main Cast, but the plot disagrees. #lore
His genetics gave Suzuha the frame that survives a one-way trip through time twice; his money, extracted from SERN under duress, kept the building standing that the lab needed to exist. Rarely has a supporting character supported so literally.
An @channel running joke — "how is that CRT shop still open?" — turns out to be load-bearing foreshadowing. Daru's casual reconstruction of the shop's books in episode-15 finds monthly deposits from a shell distributor that sells nothing, routed through an importer that the Committee paper trail later touches. The lesson this wiki draws for readers: ==in this franchise, the economics are never a plot hole; they are a clue==.
- Once lifted the lab's 42U server rack — with Daru's servers in it — up one flight of stairs, alone, out of spite.
- His ringtone is a CRT degauss sound. Nobody has dared ask.
- The "FB" phone's message log, partially recovered in operation-verdandi, runs to eleven years and ==forty thousand messages==, of which exactly three are about television repair.
Footnotes#
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Okabe's running theory, voiced in episode-03, was "front for the yakuza." He was wrong only about which organization. ↩