Bundai

Bundai (文大) is a character that appears in War of the Worlds of Samurai Champloo.

He is voiced by Norio Wakamoto in the Japanese dub and Paul St. Peter in the English dub.

Appearance
Bundai is a Japanese man who has spiky hair and wears a yellow kimono with slippers.

Personality
Bundai is an overaggressive language teacher/tutor who kidnaps and force-teaches Mugen to read and write. His methods are seemingly extremely unorthodox, which includes punching the student in the face when they get a pronunciation wrong and intimidating them with an inferiority complex if they don't learn to read and write. Although, one might observe that this extreme method of "teaching" was Bundai's way of getting revenge on Mugen for sticking him with his bar bill. The night before Bundai had (drunkenly) harassed Mugen about not being able to read the menu, forcing him to drink a wine-like liquid while lecturing him on the "souls" of the letters.

His methods, however, seem to be very effective, as Mugen not only learned to read and write in a single day but (fictionally) created the infinity symbol, which he claims to represent his name.

History
When Mugen, Fuu and Jin go out to a restaurant to eat food, Bundai overhears Fuu noticing that Mugen can't read. While he is drunk on sake, Bundai puts him in a chokehold and berating Mugen before ultimately passing out on the floor. When the trio notices graffiti, Fuu tries to give Mugen a quick reading lesson before he’s unexpectedly kidnapped by Bundai where he is being taken to his school as he aggressively attempts to teach Mugen how to read.

Meanwhile, Mugen continues his lessons with Bundai, taking quite a few beatings for his mistakes. When Mugen gets a word wrong, Bundai would punch him in the face and yell in his face. Mugen finally gets his reading skill up to Bundai’s standards and heads back to the room where he and the others are staying. Bundai watches as Mugen defeats Kazunosuke and Tatsunoshin in a contest before dragging them away.

Etymology

 * The name Bundai means "sentence" (文) (bun) and "big, great" (大) (dai).