Masumi Arakawa

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Template:Character infobox Masumi Arakawa (荒川 真澄, Arakawa Masumi) is a supporting character in Ryu ga Gotoku Online and Yakuza: Like a Dragon. He is the patriarch of the Arakawa Family, a former Tojo Clan and presently Omi Alliance subsidiary, and the acting captain of the Omi Alliance.

Appearance

In his younger days, Masumi wears a leather trench coat over snakeskin-motif shirt, a matching pair of dress pants, a pair of dark red leather shoes, a pair of leather gloves, and a fedora hat. In 2019, his attire is a bit changed, with the hat now gone, his shoes now brown instead of dark red, and his trench coat now complemented with a suit jacket and a vest. As the year progressed, his hair is also graying.

Background

SPOILER WARNING: Plot details for Yakuza: Like A Dragon follow. (Skip)

Masumi was born in 1959 to Yoko Arakawa and Toshio Arakawa. Although he had a loving father, Masumi had a troubled home life as a child and is suggested to have received the scar on his face at the hands of Yoko at a young age. Born and raised in a popular theater troupe, Masumi surpassed Toshio as a top-billing actor by the age of fourteen and was celebrated for his female roles as an onnagata. Due to how often the troupe moved from place to place, Masumi never developed friendships in school.

In 1973, after the troupe's final show of the season in Isezaki Ijincho, Yokohama, Toshio planned to treat Masumi to Peking duck at a Chinese restaurant called Heianrou. However, that night at the restaurant, Toshio was murdered by a hitman sent by the Seiryu Clan. The incident had a profound effect on Masumi, who spent the next seven years searching for the killer.

With the troupe disbanded after Toshio's death, Masumi became a drifter along with some other members of the troupe. He ended up joining the yakuza as a member of Hikawa Industries, a Tojo Clan subsidiary. Hikawa Industries regularly killed people without hesitation, which Masumi took advantage of, disposing of the bodies in Ijincho's Homeless Quarter in order to spend as much time in Yokohama as possible and track down the culprit, with no leads except for the memory of the killer's face. As part of Hikawa Industries, Masumi came to be a hardened killer.

Some time in the 1970s, the patriarch of Hikawa Industries arranged a relationship between his daughter and Masumi. This soon fizzled out due to a mutual lack of interest, and Masumi began seeing a woman named Akane in secret. In 1976, Akane told him she was pregnant, and while Masumi needed no time to deliberate on who he would rather spend his life with, he could not think of a way to bring up the subject to his patriarch. The day came when Akane was due, and Masumi made his relationship and the pregnancy to known his patriarch; however, having lost face, his patriarch had his men beat him badly and ordered them to kill both Akane and the baby.

Masumi ran away and told Akane to meet him at Cafe Alps after she had given birth. Several hours later, he received a phone call from Akane, who told him that Hikawa Industries yakuza were closing in, prompting her to run away with the newborn baby to Shinjuku Station. He told her to hide the baby in a coin locker and to get to a safer location as soon as possible to ensure their safety. However, unbeknownst to him, she hid the baby in locker #100, adjacent to locker #99 where Jo Sawashiro and his girlfriend at the time had abandoned their newborn.

After retrieving the baby from locker #99, he rushed him to hospital, where the baby was diagnosed with hypothermia-induced multiple organ failure. He later learned that Akane was caught by the yakuza and murdered while he was on his way to the hospital. He left Kamurocho for several days following the incident. It is implied that he took vengeance for what happened upon his return to Kamurocho, crushing Hikawa Industries completely. Unaware that he was not the baby's biological father, he raised him as his own, giving him the name Masato; 真 (masa), the first kanji in Masumi and 斗 (to), the first kanji in Toshio.

In 1980, he managed to track down his father's killer: Ryuhei Hoshino. He invited Hoshino to Heianrou where he interrogated Hoshino at gunpoint regarding his motives. Hoshino told him everything regarding the counterfeit operation in Yokohama and that Toshio had been smuggling bills on behalf of the organizations involved. However, one hundred million yen in counterfeit bills turned up missing while in Toshio's possession, prompting the Seiryu Clan to eliminate him; in reality, the money had been stolen by Yoko and the man she was having an affair with, Tora. Once he learned the truth, Masumi spared Hoshino's life and left quietly.

He later established the Arakawa Family, a third-tier organization within the Tojo Clan's ranks, meeting and swearing Jo Sawashiro into the family in 1982. The family gained notoriety as the "Killer Arakawa Family" due to its militant nature and became feared among the residents of Kamurocho, with Masumi himself earning the nickname "Killer Arakawa." In 1984, Hoshino gifted him a defective counterfeit bill with the words "Benevolence and strictness go hand in hand; Don't forget." inscribed on the otherwise blank backside.

One day, he was called to the offices of a rival family to retrieve and take responsibility for Ichiban Kasuga, a sixteen year old boy who had hospitalized one of their members and was claiming to be a part of the Arakawa Family. Although Kasuga was a stranger to Masumi at the time, in order to maintain his reputation, he followed through with the rival family's demands and readily offered his little finger as an apology in exchange for Kasuga's safety. He was followed back to the Arakawa Family office by Kasuga, who waited outside of the office every day for one hundred days straight, until Masumi finally relented and accepted him into the Arakawa Family.

Masumi earned the resentment of the patriarch of the Sakaki Family, Sakaki, when he interrogated Sakaki on the fact the Sakaki Family was selling Tojo Clan information to the Omi Alliance at a meeting in front of Tojo executives. He was forced to deal with the matter peacefully, as Sakaki was a direct patriarch above him in rank and feigned innocence in front of the executives. Despite his efforts, this only fanned the flames of the existing rivalry between the Arakawa Family and the Sakaki Family.

Trivia

• In Yakuza: Like a Dragon, Masumi is modeled after his voice actor, Kiichi Nakai.

Gallery

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Arakawa's full-body render (c. 2000).

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Arakawa's full-body render (c. 2019).