Gemna saotome

Appearence: He is stocky, middle aged man, Genma wears glasses with a frame that wraps around his ears, a white bandanna that covers his head, and a white gi. He used to have hair, but is now completely bald.

As a panda, he normally walks upright and will use signs to communicate. A common means for Genma to avoid answering embarrassing questions or temporarily dodge responsibility is to turn into his cursed form and play with a ball. He is much more comfortable with his cursed form than Ranma, and does not have as many issues and problems with it as Ranma does with his.

Personality: Genma follows his own interpretation of the Anything Goes Martial Arts code, which isn't exactly all that virtuous itself to begin with. Though he himself claims to be a model martial artist, and makes a point of telling Ranma about the right thing to do, it is evident that he does not practice what he preaches. He mostly concerns himself with food, generally looks out for himself, and is an occasional coward when it comes to confrontations with Happosai. When confronted with wrongdoings that he has committed, Genma typically either attempts to justify them through pleading or ridiculous logic, or else tries to either flee from or ignore the problems he has wrought.

It is debatable as to whether Genma is so much "evil" as he is "stupid". While definately selfish and cowardly, he usually does not act with deliberate malice. His primary flaws seem to be a strange combination of impulsiveness and stubbornness; Genma can set his goals in a whimsical fashion, and then will immediately start trying to pursue them without further thought and long beyond the point when common sense would suggest he stop. This is exemplified by the matter of Ranma learning the Nekoken; it speaks depths about Genma's character that he would take one look a single page of a training method and immediately force his increasingly-traumatised son to undergo it four times before finally deigning to look at the next page, which warns he should never have started it in the first place. Despite being cursed, Genma actually seems to like his panda form and freely goes about in public in it. He regularly uses it in attempts to circumvent attention when in danger of being taken to task by others by transforming into it and playing with a tire or ball. If he cannot avoid the problem, he often foists the obligation onto Ranma, which usually creates even more chaos. Although pandas cannot talk, Genma is able to communicate his thoughts while in this form by writing on wooden signs (more common in the manga), which he sometimes uses as weapons against Ranma when he is annoyed with his son. In the anime he was once shown as able to produce enough of them to construct an entire boat.

When his wife Nodoka visits, he turns into a panda in an effort to hide his and Ranma's curses from her. In this situation, he is known as Mr. Panda and is Ranko's (Ranma's female form's alias to Nodoka) pet. Nodoka has seemed far more fond of Ranko than of Mr. Panda. When both of them were sick, she fussed over Ranko, while merely commenting that Mr. Panda had warm fur. Another time, when she was helping Ranko cook dinner, she fed the inedible foods cooked to Mr. Panda. Genma's panda form was also briefly given the nickname Kumahachi, when a young boy named Yotaro discovered him and took him in as an incredibly pampered pet.

Genma consistently enjoyed being stronger than Ranma during their training trips, since it allowed him to claim most of the food, but was disturbed when Ranma recently passed his prowess in regular fighting (without special techniques), and the latter used the opportunity to repeatedly severely beat him up.

However, beyond dedicating one and a half decade of his life to teaching Ranma, there have been a few occasions when Genma has been shown to care about his son. While they were both training separately in the mountain to fight each other in a week's time, Ranma fell asleep and was covered in a blanket by Genma, although he found out that his father had also stolen his food. While helping to teach Ranma the Soul of Ice necessary to perform the Hiryu Shoten Ha, Genma wept genuine tears of regret when he had to use Embarrassing Photo-Fu and show compromising photos of Ranma to Akane and Ukyo Kuonji.

Genma is insecure about his baldness and misses the head of hair he formerly had. In the manga he is revealed to have tried out countless hair tonics to regrow his hair, none of which worked. He was overjoyed when an experimental tonic that he was trying out for Cologne had some success. However extreme growth was triggered by anger while laughter caused it to all fall out, ultimately rendering the tonic ineffective.[6]

Genma's tendency to think both only in the short-term and in regards to himself alone is perhaps the primary sticking point in their relationship, with Ranma begrudging all of the trouble he is forced to endure because of Genma's mistakes.

Abilities: As a former student of the grandmaster martial artist Happosai and the founder of the Saotome Style Anything Goes Martial Arts, Genma is an extremely proficient martial artist. He regularly trains with his son Ranma, who is even superior to Genma in regular combat, but he managed to spar on a roughly equal footing until the "Dragon's Whisker" and "Cradle of Hell" storylines. While Genma is usually too lazy or cowardly to show it, his full arsenal of special techniques would make him one of the most powerful fighters in the series if he ever used them in combination.