If you consider yourself part of the Yakuza/Like A Dragon community, you’ll more than likely be aware of who Teruyuki Kagawa is. For those that aren’t, he’s a Japanese actor that was hired to play the role of Goh Hamazaki in Yakuza Kiwami 3, with Ryu Ga Gotoku Studios having ditched the character’s original actor, George Takahashi.
After discovering this news, Yakuza fans started a campaign to get Kagawa removed from the role, as the actor was involved in a high-profile sexual harassment controversy back in 2022, after he admitted to forcefully groping a hostess during a night out in 2019. Kagawa admitted that he’d done wrong, said that he was “deeply sorry for causing trouble”, and the world moved on.
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However, Yakuza fans have taken issues with Kagawa’s casting due to the overall nature of the series, which sports a protagonist that has a hard stance against violence towards women. Over the past few months, Sega has managed to infuriate fans even more by completely ignoring the Kagawa situation, despite responding to concerns over the performance of Yakuza Kiwami 3’s demo.
One big question that has surrounded the whole debacle is exactly why Ryu Ga Gotoku Studios would work with such an infamous actor, which even brands like Toyota cut ties with after Kagawa’s sexual assault allegations were made public. Apparently, the reason is that director Ryosuke Horii needed a nasty person to play Hamazaki, and Kagawa fit the bill.
Yakuza Kiwami 3 Features Kagawa Because The Director Needed A Nasty Person
This information comes from a Game Watch interview that was published back in January, but has recently resurfaced due to fan efforts to get Kagawa recast. There are a couple of different translations floating around the internet at the moment, but the general gist of it is that Kagawa was specifically hired because they needed someone sleazy and creepy to play the character of Hamazaki. The first quote is machine translation performed by ourselves, while the second comes from Yakuza fans.
“Of course, since he also appears in ‘4’ in the original work, this casting was made with that in mind. Hamazaki is, after all, a persistent and sleazy, martial-arts-oriented yakuza. He’s not a character like Kanda, who acts decisively; he’s the type of person where you’d think, ‘This guy is really sleazy.’ So, when I thought about who could embody that, it had to be Kagawa-san.”
“Hamazaki is a sleazy, persistent, and militant yakuza, right? Since he isn’t an explosive character like Kanda, when we tried to think of someone who makes you go ‘this guy’s a creep’, naturally it was Kagawa-san.”
Of course, this isn’t an outright admission that Kagawa was hired because of his sexual assault allegations, as the actor has starred in horror movies in the past, but it’s a bizarre statement to make considering that the controversy surrounding him isn’t even that old, and was known by Yakuza fans at the time of the interview. Looking for a creepy guy to play a creepy character, and choosing to hire a man infamous for admitting to sexual assault, is certainly a choice.
- Released
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February 11, 2026
- ESRB
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Mature 17+ / Blood, Intense Violence, Sexual Themes, Strong Language, Use of Alcohol, In-Game Purchases
- Developer(s)
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Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio
