Machi Tobaye

Machi Tobaye is the Borginian piano accompaniment for the singer Lamiroir. He was involved in a cocoon smuggling case that resulted in an accusation against him for the murder of Romein LeTouse. However, he admitted to his involvement in the smuggling, which proved his innocence.

Early life
Prior to his career with Lamiroir, Tobaye was an orphan. One day, he met Lamiroir and they began to perform together, Tobaye using his skills with a piano to accompany Lamiroir. Lamiroir herself was blind, but Tobaye pretended instead to be the blind one in order to preserve her image as a singer of "sight-seeing music".

Cocoon smuggling

 * Main article: Turnabout Serenade

Tobaye was involved in the smuggling of a Borginian cocoon to Los Angeles at the request of the Chief Justice, who wanted them to cure his son, who was inflicted with Incuritis. The plan failed; during the second segment of a Gavinners concert, Interpol agent Romein LeTouse confronted Daryan Crescend, causing Crescend to steal LeTouse's .45-caliber pistol and shoot LeTouse in the shoulder. Crescend then told Tobaye (by headset) to press a switch to burn Klavier Gavin's guitar, in which the cocoon was situated. During the third segment of the concert, Apollo Justice and Ema Skye heard what they believed were gunshots, though they were actually firecrackers, and found LeTouse, who died of blood loss soon after. During the investigation, the body disappeared, only to be found at the pedestal with an unconscious Tobaye. Tobaye was accused of the murder.

To prove that Tobaye was not the killer, Justice convinced Tobaye to admit to his involvement in the smuggling. In Borginia, his crime would result in the death penalty, but in the U.S., that was not the case, so Tobaye would have to admit his crime in the U.S. to escape the death penalty.

Name

 * His Japanese given name, "Maki", when written as a kanji character, can mean "roll" (like a roll of paper or a sushi roll, but not like a bakery roll) or occasionally "Chinese black pine".


 * His full Japanese name could be a mis-romanization derivative of the Finnish name "Matti Tolvanen".


 * His English name comes from his Japanese one, presumably to make it sound foreign.


 * "Kashkash" comes from "cache-cache", the French term for "hide and seek".

Development

 * His pendant is meant to be the shape of a hiragana "ma" (ま).


 * In terms of the timeline and characters' years of birth, Machi Tobaye is the youngest character in the Ace Attorney series to date.


 * Tobaye is also, to date, the only child character accused of murder in the Ace Attorney series.


 * His clothing resembles stereotypical Finnish fashion.