Based af bro. Keep fighting the good fight, SEGA needs to recast this dude.
5 days ago | 221
as a woman in your community and in the wider yakuza community i really appreciate you writing this. thank you ❤
4 days ago | 99
i speak from personal experience when i say that even if it's not "the worst thing that could have happened," it's still incredibly violating and traumatizing to experience. no one deserves to be hurt like that. and you're right; women--all women, tbh, but especially women working in certain industries--aren't often believed or taken seriously when these things happen ("she was asking for it because she was wearing x, working in y industry, on z substance, etc."). that kagawa got away with a slap on the wrist, was given a clean slate, and is now allowed to work in projects like kiwami 3 (he was even proudly highlighted at the reveal presentation!), is beyond insulting. it's saying "we are okay with what this predat*r did and we don't care about the people he's hurt." what an awful message this sends to their female fans, to those he assa*lted, to other survivors like myself, and to everyone with a conscience. kagawa needs to be recast. i want so badly to be excited for kiwami 3, but not while it's being tainted with not just his presence, but sega's and rgg studio's enthusiastic endorsement of this predat*r.
5 days ago (edited) | 116
Dude this was amazing, thanks for writing this out. Also, even if he was different and trying to redeem himself that doesn't mean he should be allowed to just do whatever. I saw people saying that and it's like no actions have consequences. I believe people should have the right to change if they want to. But you lose things when you hurt people. You might lose your ability to be trusted or loved even if your different and you have to live with that. When you're a public person and you use that position to hurt someone even if you change you don't have the right to go back. That's a consequence you have to live with, you can't use your position to hurt people and then move on after a while like nothing happened.
5 days ago (edited) | 41
I knew my GOAT still has it 🗣️🔥 Very well said and completely agree with everything. I really do hope Sega does recast Kagawa because I can't in good faith support or enjoy Kiwami 3 with him involved. Guess we'll just have to se
5 days ago | 28
They changed Pierre Taki's face months after Judgment was released in Japan, so realistically, they can do it even BEFORE the game comes out. I've see that they've (At least the western RGG account) have been removing comments regarding the hashtag, so they've clearly have take noticed and hopefully, HOPEFULLY are doing something about it. Also, just wanna say, the people defending him (Like the woke baka gaijin guy) are stupid.
5 days ago | 55
This was incredibly well written and important, thank you a lot. Incredibly based. Really hoping they recast Hamazaki to someone who isn’t a predator.
4 days ago | 7
I’m just so disappointed with RGG on this one. They’ve even been deleting comments (Atleast on their Japanese account) that address Kagawa. I’m personally just gonna wait until it’s available to pirate (yakuza in Hawaii) if they don’t remove him
5 days ago | 7
appreciate this post and overall agree with the message. personally I'm someone who is quite forgiving towards these kinds of scandals as people love to label celebrities as 'good' or 'bad' even though our world is rarely so black and white, and I always try to give everyone the benefit of the doubt as i don't know their full story unless i know them personally. but according to the evidence shown so far he clearly has no remorse for his actions, so it's incredibly hypocritical for sega to hire him for a lad game given how these game are known for condoning such acts. and like other people have said given rggs's track record it's definitely possible to remove him from the game before the scheduled release.
5 days ago (edited) | 9
thank you for commenting on this! the trauma of sexual assault stays with you forever, and i’m not sure why so many people don’t understand that. just because he “apologized”, it doesn’t undo what was done to those women. it isn’t like RGG studios is some indie studio, they could easily find a replacement (and preferably not bring back hamazaki’s original actor either, dude is also a bad person) in no time.
4 days ago | 3
I love this post, and I hope SEGA recasts this character. but not buying a game that hundreds if not thousands of people have put their heart and soul into bc of one bad apple is definitely not something we need to hold everyone to. I'm still buying this game for the studio and employees that have made my life better, and make amazing content that I love. I'm not buying / not buying it bc of one VA.
2 days ago | 1
Unless they do end up replacing him (which doesn't seem too likely considering they're trying to just ignore the situation entirely by removing comments talking about it) I think this will be the first release from RGG Studios in years that i just won't buy at all, not even an "I'll just wait for it to go on sale" kind of thing. I'll probably do the same if/when Yakuza Kiwami 4 becomes a thing if they decide to keep him for that game too. Really disappointing and disgusting situation.
4 days ago | 4
A wall of text I actually wanted to read? Good write up dude, spit your shit.
5 days ago | 11
You're a real one dude, even without this post I'd have never assumed you would have endorsed such actions.
5 days ago | 15
SnowiestAngeman
Hello, everyone! Been a while (I was getting all of the achievements in Baldur’s Gate 3, sorry) but about 11 hours from this post I’ll be continuing the playthrough I started of Yakuza 3, and hopefully finishing it? We’ll see. But before then there’s a couple of important things I wanted to talk about.
The first was that I wanted to say a big thank you to the shockingly positive reception to my most recent video. For the first time in what feels like years, I have been met with nothing but nice comments. All too often in the Yakuza community people decide to take things too personally, whether it’s me or it’s some random person on Twitter just saying that they like Pirate Yakuza. But this time around, the personal side of things has been the best part of the discussion. I’ve been enjoying reading some people’s personal experiences with their trips to Japan, as well as seeing people say that they’re excited to visit there because of my video. Thank you all very much for the kind words. I’m glad that the Yakuza community have decided to create a temporary truce in the comment section where they won’t attack strangers on the internet for liking the same game franchise as them lol.
But there’s been another rare display of unity amongst this community recently. You may already be aware of the situation regarding the actor playing Hamazaki in the upcoming Yakuza Kiwami 3, but I will try and explain it as best I can anyway. I also have no idea what happens to YouTube posts when you use bad words, so I will try my best in that regard too.
Hamazaki’s original actor from 3/4/Ishin has been recast, and at least at the time of writing this, will be played by Teruyuki Kagawa. At the 2025 Summit when this was revealed, the only problem people had was that it was a strange choice to not only change Hamazaki’s actor, but also to now model his face after the actor. However, shortly after the event, news was spread about an incident Kagawa was involved in. “Allegedly”. “Supposedly”. I’m probably supposed to use words like that, but that’s journo language. I’m not a journalist. I’m just an average bloke in his twenties, and so that’s what this is from the perspective of.
In 2019, Teruyuki Kagawa sexually assaulted two women: a hostess, and the mama of the bar that the hostess was working in. There are plenty of details online about what he exactly did to them, as well as photos of the exact occurrence with one of the women. It may not be the worst thing in the world, but even if it seems trivial in comparison to what “could have happened”, it’s still assault. He did something that even the Yakuza games themselves show hostesses face all the time. Saeko in Like a Dragon quite literally experienced the exact same thing. These sorts of occurrences are always highlighted as being legitimate problems, and not just “a guy being a bit handsy”. So you have to wonder how SEGA themselves, who very likely knew of the situation since it became widely reported on in 2022, would decide to cast him in their new game. Perhaps it’s some 5D Chess move casting a creep to play a creep, but that’s still not a good reason to work with him.
The sad part about it though is that this isn’t some uniquely instanced situation, and SEGA haven’t glossed over the details by accident. This sort of thing unfortunately happens quite a lot in the world, and in Japan it happens a lot more than many of us may realise.
To put it very bluntly, Japan is a very sexist and racist country. They’re even racist to someone like me and yes I say that as a white man, which I understand is the pinnacle of throwing stones in my glass house. It’s of course not the only country like this, and it’s of course not everyone there. I’ve had my fair share of hateful looks over there, but I’ve also had incredibly lovely experiences with the locals. They don’t go around kicking their own residents out of the country because they “look a bit foreign” like a certain someone (well, not yet, at least). And they of course still allow women to vote and to work, so it’s not like they’re necessarily in the stone age. But there very much exists a mentality, whether conscious or subconscious, that particular people are undeserving of the same respect you’d give to certain other people, to say the least. And in this instance, the particular people are women.
Hostesses for example are faced with mistreatment by men who choose not to understand that they are professionals doing their job. Because they get close and personal with these men, it often leads to misunderstood consent, and problems like the one with Kagawa occur. A sensible man would simply be able to understand the misunderstanding, and not act on it. These women are radically different from the kind of women you *would* pay to do those sort of things. But even those kinds of women are still deserving of the same respect you’d give anyone else. Just because they’re women doesn’t mean they’re less.
I am fortunate to have never even come close to being a victim of any of these sorts of things. The easy joke would be to say that it’s because I’m ugly, overweight, and autistic, but quite frankly it’s because I am a man. Men still suffer such atrocities, but it is certainly much harder for women to avoid them, especially women in Japan. Over there, rather than ever actually trying to make meaningful change, the government just force your camera to have a shutter sound effect and have ‘women only’ carriages on trains and call it a day.
You of course see people who do these things being publicly shamed or criminally charged, like what happens in Lost Judgment (because again SEGA themselves are clearly aware of the problem). But there are likely many situations that occur which are never reported on, or where the victims are far too afraid to speak up out of fear of the consequences. Many things that occur in more private situations, such as at home or just simply outside of work hours, are made to be silent. Even *celebrities* in Japan manage to have very private private lives. A lot of the time, even if something bad is happening in someone’s private life, it’s very taboo to share it or talk about it, whether you’re the actual celebrity or if you’re just a friend/colleague. Japan is also a country that very much downplays any of these sorts of problems when a woman is the victim. Even if their whole “outside of work hours” secrecy they love wasn’t a thing, a lot of the time they won’t see what the problem is, and won’t bother raising the issue. This is why it took until 2022 for this information to properly come about.
And even after the truth was revealed, Kagawa’s apology was really just a slap in the face to the one of two women he actually apologised to. He disappeared from the public eye for a couple months (because the public forced him to, not because he thought it was the right thing to do), but then came back to working on creative projects like Kiwami 3 for example. You could of course argue that this was a one off occurrence, and that this situation may likely never happen again with him. It was 6 years ago, after all. I won’t make any accusations about what could potentially occur behind closed doors, but I will say that even if he is Good Guy McGee now, why would you willingly work with someone who goes against one of the biggest messages constantly portrayed in your own creative work? It’s not some woke baka gaijin mentality, it’s just common courtesy to not want to work with someone who has the capability to view and treat women the way he did, especially when that goes against what you preach.
I am an immensely facetious man, but I do hope those of you reading this know that I’m not so detached from reality that I can’t see the problem in this. It’s definitely not the worst thing in the world, he certainly *could* have done much worse. Whether or not he *would* have is a question I hope never gets answered. But regardless, this is not someone SEGA should work with.
It would definitely be the right move from SEGA, a company quite proud of their pride, to set an example and show that they are willing to display some morality. It almost certainly won’t even make a dent in the general mindset that plagues many people over there, but it shows victims of similar acts that there are at least *some* people on their side.
It’s still not even been a month since the announcement of Kiwami 3, so hopefully given time the situation will resolve. They made all of Gaiden in 6 months, after all. I really want to play and make content for Kiwami 3, both because I’m a huge fan and because it’s literally my job. It would be incredibly easy for me to only ever feature gameplay and to skip any scene involving Hamazaki, but then I would be guilty of literally the exact same problem women in Japan face where men simply turn a blind eye to the issue.
I do not want to be associated in even the most remote way to Teruyuki Kagawa.
5 days ago | [YT] | 1,477