Masumi Arakawa (荒川 真澄, Arakawa Masumi), also known by his stage name Taro Arayoshi (荒良 太郎, Arayoshi Tarō), is a recurring character in the Like a Dragon (formerly Yakuza) series introduced as an antagonist in Ryu Ga Gotoku Online and a supporting character in Yakuza: Like a Dragon.
In Ryu Ga Gotoku Online, he is the patriarch of the Arakawa Family and the captain of the Omi Alliance. In Yakuza: Like a Dragon, Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name, and flashbacks in Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, he is the first patriarch of the Arakawa Family and the acting captain of the Omi Alliance.
His long history as a hitman and his reputation as the militant leader of the Arakawa Family earned him the nickname "Arakawa the Assassin" (殺しの荒川, Koroshi no Arakawa).
Profile[]
Appearance[]
Yakuza: Like a Dragon: Masumi's face is modeled after his voice actor, Kiichi NakaiWP. He appears to have a relatively slim build. In his younger years, he has somewhat androgynous features allowing him to perform in female roles with ease. He also wears his short black hair parted to the right.
After he joins the yakuza, he slicks part of his hair back in a more clean-cut style. His eyes are dark brown and described as having the "hard, flinty gaze of an old killer"[4] by the age of twenty. He has a scar on the right side of his face he received from his mother in childhood, which is shallow enough to cover with makeup. Part of his little finger on his left hand is missing.
He has a faint mustache in his twenties but is clean-shaven through his thirties and forties. By his most recent appearance in 2019 he has a neatly-trimmed goatee. As the years progress, his hair is also graying.
Ryu Ga Gotoku Online: Masumi has a solid build. His features are typically obscured by his fedora or by shadow, but he appears to have short black hair and brown eyes. He is clean shaven in his younger years but has a small goatee on his chin by his most recent appearance in 2018. Part of his little finger on his left hand is missing.
Attire[]
Yakuza: Like a Dragon: In his younger days, Masumi wears a black double breasted leather trench coat over a gray snakeskin patterned dress shirt, black slacks, a pair of dark red leather oxfords, a black leather belt with a gold buckle, a pair of black leather gloves, and a black fedora hat. In 2019, his attire changes a bit, 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. In 1969, when he is not wearing his Onnagata outfit, he wears a white dress shirt with the top button unbuttoned, khaki pants, a black leather belt with a silver buckle, and white Velcro sneakers.
Personality[]
As a yakuza patriarch, Masumi appears as a strong, wise, and considerate person towards his underlings, especially Ichiban, whom he treats just like an actual son. Masumi believes in yakuza ideals of honor, family, and chivalry, passing many of these lessons onto to Ichiban. While lenient towards failure, Masumi takes uploading the honor, reputation, and the inners working of his family seriously, often acting as mediator to smooth out the mutual antagonism between Ichiban and Sawashiro. In more relax settings, Masumi shown to be good-humored, understanding, and comforting. Masumi is a caring and loving father to Masato, though he admits to being rather soft on matters concerning his son. Dutiful and sharp, Masumi possessed strong determination to see goals to fruition and carry out his obligations to the end, no matter how long they takes.
While typically cool-headed and merciful, Masumi can be emotional and vengeful, especially concerning towards his loved ones. In order to avenge his father, Masumi grew up to be talented, vicious combatant and a harden killer at a young age to find out the truth of his death. To protect his lover Akane Kishida and their child, Masumi went on a killing spree of the Hikawa family, even torturing his former patriarch to death in an attempt make him to call off the hit on her. He felt immense guilt of his treatment towards Ichiban, particularly having to shoot him, and is greatly moved by Ichiban's steadfast devotion that he had for him. Before his death, Masumi implied that he figured out Ichiban is his real son, but choose not share his findings since Ichiban was ambivalent about his biological parentage.
Background[]
Masumi was born in 1956 to Yoko Arakawa and Toshio Arakawa. Although he had a loving father, Masumi had a troubled home life as a child, and received the scar on his face at the hands of his mother at a young age. Born and raised in a popular theater troupe called Araboshi-za, Masumi surpassed Toshio as a top-billing actor in the taishū engekiWP genre by the age of fourteen and was celebrated for his female roles as an onnagataWP. Due to how often the troupe moved from place to place, Masumi never developed friendships in school.
In 1970, 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 Heian Tower. 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 drifted to Kamurocho along with some fellow troupe members. He ended up joining the yakuza at the age of seventeen under the Hikawa Family, a Tojo Clan subsidiary. The Hikawa Family 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 behind his father's murder, with no leads except for the memory of the killer's face. As part of Hikawa Family, Masumi came to be a hardened killer.
The patriarch of Hikawa Family eventually 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 Kishida in secret. In 1976, Masumi decided to settle down with Akane after she told him she was pregnant, but could not think of a way to bring up the subject to his patriarch. He only made his relationship and the pregnancy known to his patriarch the day Akane was due; however, having lost face, his patriarch had his men beat him badly and ordered them to kill both Akane and the baby.
Masumi escaped 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 Family 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 number 0101, adjacent to locker 0099 where Jo Sawashiro and his then-girlfriend had abandoned their newborn.
After retrieving the baby from locker 0099, Masumi rushed him to the hospital, where the baby was diagnosed with hypothermia-induced multiple organ failure. He was later informed that Akane was caught by yakuza and murdered while he was on his way to the hospital. He left Kamurocho for several days following the incident. Upon his return to Kamurocho, he crushed the Hikawa Family completely as vengeance. Unaware that he was not the baby's biological father, he raised him as his own. He gave him the name Masato; 真 (masa), the first kanji in Masumi and 斗 (to), the first kanji in Toshio.
By 1978, he managed to track down his father's killer: Ryuhei Hoshino. He invited Hoshino to Ijincho's Heian Tower where he interrogated him 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 at the time, his former co-star Tora. Once he learned the truth, Masumi spared Hoshino's life and left quietly.
Between 1978 and 1982, he established the Arakawa Family, a third-tier organization within the Tojo Clan's ranks. The family gained notoriety due to its militant nature and became feared among the residents of Kamurocho, with Masumi himself earning the nickname "Arakawa the Assassin." Although he appeared to have assistance from his men, raising Masato proved difficult. He was unequipped to handle Masato's dejection and resentment surrounding his disability, and even as a toddler, Masato was prone to tantrums he never had the heart to resist. After he met and swore Jo Sawashiro into the family in 1982, he came to consider him someone he could place his complete trust in and made him his captain, treasurer, and right-hand man. The two seemingly developed a mutual sense of responsibility for Masato's care although Sawashiro never admitted he was Masato's biological father.
In 1984, the year the design of the ¥10,000 bill changed, he was gifted a defective counterfeit by Hoshino. It had the words "Neither justice nor mercy should tip the scale." inscribed on the otherwise blank backside, meaning those in power must reward and punish where necessary. It represented the leverage Masumi had over the Ijin Three, as he had the ability to make the counterfeiting operation public knowledge. Masumi held onto the bill from that point onward.
One day, in 1993, he was called to the offices of the Shinomiya Family to take responsibility for Ichiban Kasuga, a sixteen-year-old boy who had hospitalized one of their members and was claiming to be from the Arakawa Family. Although he had never met Kasuga before, in order to maintain his reputation, he agreed to the rival family's demands. He readily followed through with performing yubitsumeWP in exchange for Kasuga's return. When asked why he would go to those lengths in the first place, he simply stated that he "felt like impressing an idiot kid who knew [his] name."
Having left a strong impression on Kasuga, he was followed back to the Arakawa Family office, where Kasuga waited outside every day for one hundred days straight until Masumi finally relented and accepted him into the Arakawa Family. He eventually grew to view Ichiban as his son and entrusted him with looking after Masato. The dynamic within the family was tense, however, with Sawashiro's constant abuse of Kasuga often placing Masumi into the role of mediator.
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.
Involvement[]
Yakuza: Like a Dragon: 2000-2019[]
On New Year's Eve in 2000, Arakawa takes Ichiban Kasuga out for Peking duck, but all restaurants serving it are closed. The next day, Arakawa calls Kasuga into his office, gravely telling him to be inconspicuous. The previous night, Masato had killed a man from the rival Sakaki Family. Due to existing tensions with the Sakaki as well as the fact that they are a higher rank, Masumi would need to make amends. He asks Kasuga to turn himself in, telling him the lie that it was Sawashiro who committed the murder.
In 2004, the Arakawa Family assists Masato in faking his death and starting a new identity as Ryo Aoki before he leaves for the USA. When he returns, Aoki has the Arakawa Family support him in his political career. In 2017, the year Kasuga was going to be released were it not for his sentence extension, Masumi writes a letter to him expressing how much he misses him, and invites him for Peking duck when he leaves.
Also in 2017, the newly-elected Tokyo governor Aoki pressures the Arakawa Family into leaking Tojo Clan intel in order to dismantle it using the Kamurocho 3K Plan, threatening to use the anti-yakuza laws to arrest him if he did not comply. Sawashiro suggests leaking information in exchange for the Family's continued survival. Masumi approaches the sixth chairman Daigo Dojima with the plan, who approves it as both he and Omi Alliance captain Masaru Watase were planning to disband the Tojo and the Omi to prevent the law from using them as pawns, and the Kamurocho 3K plan succeeding would work towards that goal. In order to complete this plan, Masumi feigns turning over to the Omi.
Masumi passes the information to Aoki, who uses it to drive the Tojo Clan from Kamurocho and allow the Omi Alliance to take over uncontested, with police commissioner Juro Horinouchi being bribed into allowing it to happen. This splits the Omi's forces in half, which would be instrumental at the time of both organizations' dissolution. Along with Dojima and Watase, Masumi plans to start up a security company in Sotenbori to serve as a home for the yakuza who would have nowhere else to go after the dissolution.
The betrayal causes Tojo remnants to attack Masumi every once in a while, but he survives and climbs the ranks. By Kasuga's release in 2019, Masumi had been appointed the acting captain of the Omi Alliance and continues to cooperate with Aoki. During a visit to the former Omi chairman's grave, Kasuga sees and calls out to him, but he feigns ignorance to avoid blowing his cover.
Later that day, Masumi attends a meeting with the other Omi Alliance patriarchs at Heian Tower - where Masumi had hoped to treat Kasuga to Peking duck - when Kasuga barges into the room. Noting everything is going according to plan, Masumi shoots Kasuga non-lethally and has him taken to Isezaki Ijincho, a location out of the Omi's reach. Kasuga's unconscious body is placed in a homeless camp whose chief has a pact with the Arakawa Family and Masumi had secretly placed one of Ryuhei Hoshino's defective counterfeit bills in his suit's chest pocket as a message to Hoshino.
Much later, at Omi Alliance headquarters, Masumi interrupts Goro Majima and Taiga Saejima's fight against Kasuga and his party and introduces the latter to Dojima. They explain their plan to their guests. The next day, Watase and Dojima declare the dissolution of both of their organizations and are met with resistance from the Omi officers. Thanks to the split, there is not enough manpower to crush them and Yosuke Tendo joins Masumi's side as he could not resist the urge to fight such a brawl. Masumi, Tendo, Watase's mysterious bodyguard, and Kasuga and his party fight the opposition and win, allowing the dissolution to succeed.
Some time following the events, Masumi and Kasuga meet at the docks in Yokohama at night and spend some time together. Masumi talks about his concerns with Masato and his plans for post-yakuza life and Kasuga expresses his desire to be a family again. Before they part, Masumi talks about a strange dream where Kasuga and Masato swapped places in their births. Masumi then heads to Heian Tower for dinner with Hoshino.
On the way back home, he encounters Tendo and they discuss the events that transpired right before Masumi is alerted by Tendo of Reiji Ishioda's attempt to assassinate him. With Ishioda's plan thwarted, Tendo now has a chance at the top and kills Masumi to get back in the Omi remnants' good graces after betraying them. Masumi is shot in the chest and dies a painful death, the last sight in his life being Tendo's smile. Masumi's body was thrown in the river and recovered the next morning.
Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth: Arakawa's remains were cremated, and some of the ashes were stored in a small capsule that Kasuga keeps on him as a necklace. Once Kasuga finds Akane and they find time to spend together, he delivers the capsule to her, finally giving her closure.
Gameplay[]
Related Cards[]
Ryu Ga Gotoku Online[]
Masumi's first card in Ryu Ga Gotoku Online, SSR Masumi Arakawa (Black), was first released on September 24, 2020 and depicts the version of him seen in the main story of Ryu Ga Gotoku Online. It is the second card released as part of a series of SSR cards known as Black cards, which center around various antagonists in the Yakuza series. Although Black cards are normally upgraded versions of existing cards, SSR Masumi Arakawa (Black) is the first and only Black card to serve as a character's "debut" card.
As a Defense-type Yin card, this card places Masumi in an inactive role, with skills that emphasize his militaristic and inspirational qualities as a leader that earned him his nickname and his subordinates' adoration. These skills mainly focus on increasing the survivability and offensive capabilities of Offense-type allies and confer a huge boost of up to 92% in total to criticality rate. As such, this card has a strong affinity towards Offense-type cards that attack multiple times at once.
Trivia[]
- Masumi is referred to with both masculine and feminine terms. He is described as a "talented actress"[5] in his teens (although onnagata portray women, they are always described as actors), and as a "mother"[6] later in life; however, the original Japanese uses the gender-neutral term "parent"[6] (親, oya).
Gallery[]
Yakuza: Like a Dragon[]
.png "YLAD - Character Render - Masumi Arakawa (2000).png (413 KB)")
.png "YLAD - Character Render - Masumi Arakawa (2019).png (394 KB)")
Ryu Ga Gotoku Online[]
.png "RGGO - Card - SSR Masumi Arakawa (Black).png (326 KB)")
.png "RGGO - Card - SSR Masumi Arakawa (YLAD Black).png (330 KB)")
.png "RGGO - Card - KSR Masumi Arakawa (YLAD Fighting Spirit).png (385 KB)")
![KSR [Bullet with a Message] Masumi Arakawa (Y:LAD Kiwami)](/wiki/File:RGGO_-_Card_-_KSR_Masumi_Arakawa_(YLAD_Kiwami).png "RGGO - Card - KSR Masumi Arakawa (YLAD Kiwami).png (389 KB)")
.png "RGGO - Card - KSR Masumi Arakawa (YLAD Kiwami II).png (365 KB)")
Notes[]
- ↑ Masumi is twenty years older than Masato, who was born on December 31, 1976. Specifically, he is stated to be twenty in scenes voiced by Johnny Yong Bosch in the English audio, which all take place on the night of Masato's birth.
- ↑ The given birth year of 1956 is an estimate based on Arakawa's age and is not intended as a substitute for an official date.
- ↑ The given height of 185 cm (6′ 1″) is based on the character model's scaling factor within Yakuza: Like a Dragon's data.[1] For Dragon Engine games, this method is believed to be very accurate (±2 cm). However, this is intended as an estimate, not a substitute for an official statistic.
- ↑ The given birth years of 1959/1960 are an estimate based on Arakawa's age and are not intended as a substitute for an official date.
References[]
- ↑ Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio, “character_model_model_data” (.BIN file), Yakuza: Like a Dragon (2020; Tokyo: SEGAWP, 2020), PlayStation 4/PlayStation 5/Xbox One/Xbox Series X and S/Windows/Amazon Luna.
- ↑ Zach Aguilar (@airzach), “Started playing Yakuza: Like a Dragon and completely forgot that I played young Masumi Arakawa at the very start of the game! Crazy to think I share a character with George Takei 🤯, ” Twitter, November 23, 2020, 9:18 a.m. UTC, https://twitter.com/airzach/status/1330802989183893504.
- ↑ Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio, download screen, Ryū Ga Gotoku Online 龍が如く ONLINE [Ryu Ga Gotoku Online] (Tokyo: SEGAWP, 2018), Android/iOS/Windows.
2000年当時、40歳。
— Download Screen, Ryu Ga Gotoku Online40 years old in 2000.
- ↑ Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio, “Chapter 10: Justice Tempered by Mercy”, Yakuza: Like a Dragon (2020; Tokyo: SEGAWP, 2020), PlayStation 4/PlayStation 5/Xbox One/Xbox Series X and S/Windows/Amazon Luna.— Hoshino about Arakawa (English audio, English subtitles), Yakuza: Like a Dragon
He didn't look a day over twenty, but his eyes had that hard, flinty gaze of an old killer.
- ↑ Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio, “A Talented Actress” (cutscene) in “Chapter 1: Light and Shadow”, Yakuza: Like a Dragon (2020; Tokyo: SEGAWP, 2020), PlayStation 4/PlayStation 5/Xbox One/Xbox Series X and S/Windows/Amazon Luna.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio, “Oya to Ko” 親と子 [Mother and Child] (cutscene) in “Jūgoshō: Nariagari no Hate” 十五章 成り上がりの果て [Chapter 15: To the Pinnacle], Ryū Ga Gotoku 7: Hikari to Yami no Yukue 龍が如く7 光と闇の行方 [Yakuza: Like a Dragon] (2020; Tokyo: SEGAWP, 2020), PlayStation 4/PlayStation 5/Xbox One/Xbox Series X and S/Windows/Amazon Luna.