Rock

A former Japanese salaryman who joins the Lagoon Company after being abandoned by his corporation, also known as Rock. Rokurō Okajima is the main male protagonist of the Black Lagoon series. He is a Japanese businessman who turned into an unwitting pirate of the Lagoon Company. Rock is a fair-skinned, Japanese ex-salaryman with a skinny build and a height of 173 centimeters (or 5'8"). His black hair has fringe on the right side, and he has brown eyes. Eda, who likes to tease Rock, defines him as "handsome," but little is known about how others perceive his physical appearance beyond noticing his grooming. In the manga, Rock's employee information shows that he was born in August 1974, making him 20 years old at the beginning of the manga series (early 1995). In contrast, the anime shows that he was born on August 21, 1970, making him 24 at the anime's beginning in 1995 (though his employee certificate erroneously says 25 as his age). Despite being a pirate, Rock is able to retain his business persona by continuing to wear a teal neck tie, short-sleeved dress shirt, slacks, and dress shoes. From the outside, Rock appears as a normal person, which ironically makes him stand out from the rest of Roanapur's residents. On the other hand, Revy preferred Rock to wear the Hawaiian shirt that she bought for him when he first joined the company. Being who he is, Rock prefers his usual wear even when he is at Yellow Flag or on a job. Ultimately, Rock not abandoning his Japanese salaryman appearance represents his lingering attachment to his old way of life. Rock is a humble and good-natured person despite being on the business end of guns from friends and foe alike. Initially, he is often surprised at the barbarity of the international criminal underworld. Although in the criminal world, he maintains his business persona by wearing his business outfit. He is not a fighter in any way, but rather a pacifist who prefers to use words over weapons when interacting with the hostile people encountered on the job. Rock, from joining the Lagoon Company, has occasionally wondered if he is experiencing Stockholm syndrome, consequentially developing a friendship with his former captors and current co-workers. Yukio Washimine once described him as someone who was neither in a civilian nor criminal world but rather in the twilight, unable to chose between a life of crime or normality. Within the Lagoon Company, Rock is usually responsible for account management, diplomacy, negotiation, translation, interpretation, and running occasional errands. Having worked in the resource department of Asahi Industries, Rock is skilled in geology and chemistry. He is also a skilled linguist due to frequent traveling from his previous job, being able to speak various languages such as Japanese (his native language), English, Spanish, some Russian, and has some familiarity with Romance languages, including some French. He also has a surprisingly high tolerance for alcohol, owing to the heavy drinking lifestyle of a ladder climbing salaryman. Rock's earnest personality has earned him the interest and respect of several characters in Roanapur, which caused those like Balalaika, Mr. Chang, Rowan, Sister Yolanda and Eda to develop an interest in him, and the young Garcia Lovelace, whom he trusts to the greatest degree. In many ways, Rock is the heart of the Lagoon Company, serving as a balance for his more jaded teammates and as a bright spot in the world of darkness that is Roanapur. He retains a strong sense of right and wrong, trying to hold on to and share his beliefs with others in Roanapur. He is often shocked and horrified by how people suffer from the injustices of the criminal underworld despite his best efforts, wearing him down as the series progresses. Although physically weak and unarmed, Rock has shown tremendous courage to stand up for himself, others, and for what he believes is right as seen when he clashes with other characters over their immoral actions, especially Revy. Despite not being adept at combat, he is significantly faster and stronger than he looks, as he was able to disarm Revy after she tried to execute him at point blank range, and take a punch from her in the face without so much as flinching. Rock is one of the smartest and most resourceful people in Roanapur. Having perfected the job of a businessman, Rock is excellent at gathering information and knows how to fully utilize them to his favor. His attention to details and ability to piece information together has earned him praise from an intellectual individual like Sister Yolanda as well as Mister Chang himself. Because of his unconventional way of thinking, Rock is able to formulate solutions and think of scenarios that no one can ever think of. Even when driven to a corner, Rock is capable of thinking under pressure to calculate and come up with the best course of actions for most circumstances. While he has not personally killed any person, Rock has suggested and organized plans for other people to kill people, such as his torpedo plan in "Black Lagoon," his plan to trick and kill several fighters in "Goat, Jihad, Rock'N Roll," and his ambush plan in "L'homme sombre." Despite being an excellent critical thinker and problem solver, Rock's deadliest intellect lies with his gift to pick the most effective but riskiest solution in existence, prompting other characters to characterize his actions as that of a high stakes gambler. He is one of the "luckiest" characters in the series as he managed to survive every single thing he experienced from being taken hostage to being shot at. Thus far, he has survived the wrath of Revy, Balalaika, Roberta and Frederica Sawyer, all without using a weapon other than his wit and running away. Later in the series, Rock begins to enjoy his life as a pirate, becoming even more comfortable with corruption, and it is shown that a darker side of his personality had begun to emerge. In Roberta's Blood Trail, he is personally appointed by Mister Chang to help Garcia and Fabiola Iglesias track down Roberta before she finds the American Special Forces unit that killed Diego Lovelace (Garcia's father), before she and the unit kill each other and endanger Roanapur to destruction at the hands of the United States. Rock knows that Chang does not care if Garcia or Roberta is killed and only wants to keep Roanapur out of the eyes of the world for its drug trafficking. Rock manages to turn Chang's plan around by demonstrating exceptional deductive reasoning skills, figuring out every factions' motives and playing on them. He manages to give the Americans an escape route out of Roanapur, towards their mission area in Laos, as well as having Roberta follow them and have Garcia snap Roberta out of her psychotic rampage. However, doing all that requires him to use the same callous and manipulative thinking as Chang, and he even seems to find the same sense of power over others psychologically rewarding. However, this apparent change in Rock alienates and disturbs the other characters, particularly Revy and Dutch, who do not understand Rock's motives and think he is simply doing it to extract a large reward from Garcia, causing them to fear that Rock is becoming sadistic, selfish, cunning, and ruthless due to being corrupted by Roanapur. However, he does it entirely because he wanted to save someone, and manages to achieve Chang's goal of keeping the U.S. out as well as saving Fabiola, Garcia and Roberta. Fabiola, enraged by Rock's high-risk strategy which involved manipulating Garcia into a game of "Cambodian Roulette" with Roberta and gambling with people's lives, shoots him with a blank and states that she hopes to never see him again. Months later, things had not changed in Roanapur and Rock begins to think he has not made a difference at all. Revy later tells him that it will hurt him if he continues to look at Roanapur with life in his eyes, to which Rock responds that he came close to the darkness but is not ready for it yet. For a time after this, Rock remained perturbed by the concluding events of the "El Baile de la muerte" arc and withdrew completely from his usual shtick of trying to help people. However, the introduction of Feng Yifei saw him revert to his previous behavior. After telling Revy about his decision to not get involved in other peoples' misfortunes, she, not wanting Rock's altruistic nature fading further away, chose to involve herself in Feng's issues in order to involve Rock. Rock was able to bring Feng's difficulties to a successful conclusion, and despite engineering the deaths of several assassins, he was able to find a niche to settle into which enabled him to be ruthless but in the pursuit of an ultimately noble goal. The primary difference between this and his previous endeavor appears simply to be his willingness to tell his associates about his plans rather than manipulating them. He also appeared, through conversations with Feng about the nature of freedom versus security, to come to a more thorough understanding of himself and what he wants out of life. Rock was born into a well-to-do but neglectful family in Tokyo. Due to him failing to enter college on his first try, his family lowered their expectations of him and begin to favor his academically capable older brother who landed a job with the Japanese government. Rock was able to enter college on his second try a year later but by then, his family has already cast away all expectations of him, leaving him to do whatever he wanted. After graduating from a state university, Rock was able to find a job at Asahi Heavy Industrial Co. in its materials procurement department as a salaryman. Since then, Rock had lived an unremarkable life as a white collar salaryman working for Asahi Industries under his boss Fujiwara until he had his near-death encounter with the Lagoon Company.