Behind an orphanage, a boy with a scar across his face is piling up dirt. It is a grave for his parents, killed in the car accident that left him the mark. Another boy walks up, compliments the scar and, once he understands what the mound is, kicks it apart: the dead can’t protect you anymore, so forget them; from now on your life is worth something, because I will be your king and you will be my servant. The boy who kicks is Izana Kurokawa. The boy with the grave is Kakucho, and the memory, which Ken Wakui’s Tokyo Revengers manga tells in chapter 175, explains one of the most loyal characters in the series. Kakucho is the first of the Four Heavenly Kings of Tenjiku, the Yokohama gang Izana sends against Mikey’s Toman in the Tenjiku arc, the one adapted in the anime’s third season (2023). He is Izana’s right hand, his best fighter and, on top of that, a childhood friend of Takemichi. Some websites call him “Hitto Kakucho,” but hittō is not a surname: it is his rank, “the first” of the four. (Spoiler warning: this file reveals the end of the Tenjiku arc and of the manga.)
// The theoryLooking for someone to protect you
John Bowlby began with a study of delinquency, “Forty-Four Juvenile Thieves” (1944), and ended with a general theory of the bond, the Attachment and Loss trilogy (1969, 1973 and 1980). His central idea is that attachment is a biological system: the child seeks closeness to a figure who protects him, and from that relationship he builds internal working models, expectations about whether others will be there and whether he deserves that they are. That figure does not have to be the mother, or even an adult. Anna Freud and Sophie Dann (1951) described six small children who had survived the Theresienstadt camp without parents: when they reached England they distrusted adults and were attached to one another, with a fierce loyalty. And Bowlby’s third volume, Loss (1980), studies what happens when the bond breaks: grief moves through phases (numbing, yearning and searching, disorganization and despair, reorganization) and can go wrong, for example as compulsive self-reliance, the stance of someone who decides to need no one.
A king instead of parents
The grave scene is substitute attachment in its purest form. Kakucho has just lost his protective figures, and Izana offers exactly what an attachment figure offers: someone who stays, a place and a reason to live. The bond is real and mutual, because Izana, an orphan too, will tell him as he dies that Kakucho is the only one he has. But it comes with a form, king and servant, and with a price: forgetting the dead. The model Kakucho learns is that his life is worth something because he serves someone, and that template decides what his loyalty will look like.
// The subjectThe one who stays
The manga shows Kakucho in three moments that trace that bond. The first is in Yokohama (chapters 128 and 129; anime episode 38): Kakucho meets the Toman boys with a hundred men, sends them away because he won’t fight a hundred against four, loses to Smiley and confesses to Takemichi that he lost on purpose so they could talk alone. He calls him his hero, tells him he now belongs to Izana and that they are enemies, and asks for something unexpected: that Takemichi save Izana from Kisaki. The second comes on the eve of the war (chapter 144): he argues against fighting Toman and asks why Izana trusts Kisaki and Hanma, newcomers whose plan involves killing. Izana ignores him, and he stays. The third is February 22, 2006, the Kanto Incident (chapters 153 to 185): Takemichi accuses him of knowing about the plan to kill Emma, Mikey’s sister; Kakucho beats him down and tells him childhood friendship can be broken. But when Izana, beaten by Mikey, grabs Kisaki’s gun and aims at Mikey, Kakucho slaps it out of his hand and announces that Tenjiku has lost. Izana orders his executives to kill him, and none of them moves. Kisaki shoots Kakucho, and when he fires again, Izana steps in front and takes the bullets. He dies at Kakucho’s side (chapters 175 to 177; in the anime, episodes 48 and 49, near the end of the third season).
Kakucho
Get the map of theories for free
Subscribe to the criminal archive —one case a week, no spam— and I'll send you The map of theories: the great currents of criminology on a single sheet.
// The crackThe bond doesn’t choose the orders
Attachment theory explains why Kakucho could not walk away. It does not explain why he obeyed. The same bond that stops him at the last moment had made him complicit before: he knew about Emma and kept quiet, as Takemichi reproaches him, and in one of the futures Takemichi visits at the start of the arc, it is Kakucho who shoots him on Izana’s orders (chapter 134). Afterward, the manga follows Kakucho through grief with almost textbook precision. Beside the body, as snow falls, he promises Izana that he won’t be alone because he will follow soon, and he remembers the snow fort where, as children, they planned a kingdom for orphans like themselves and gave it a name (chapter 178). In the hospital he says he is always the one who survives (chapter 185). And on the day of Emma’s funeral he goes back to the orphanage and builds Izana a grave like the one Izana once kicked apart (chapter 186). In the timelines without Izana, the bond left free carries him into other gangs: South Terano recruits him into Rokuhara Tandai with his fists (chapter 227), and in the 2018 future he is Bonten’s number three (chapter 196).
The manga’s ending closes the argument. In the last timeline, with Izana alive, Tenjiku is a nonprofit that helps orphaned children, and Kakucho works there as a volunteer (chapter 278). It is the same bond and the same dream from the snow fort, in a different context, and it produces no crime. That is what the theory asks us to see: attachment has no moral content of its own; that comes from the figure one attaches to and from what that figure asks. Explaining Kakucho is not excusing him. He beat people, kept quiet and, in one future, pulled the trigger, and he did it knowingly; the bond explains why saying no was so hard for him, and his own slap at the gun proves he could say it.
The bonds of children without families
The report Bowlby wrote for the WHO in 1951 on maternal deprivation changed orphanages across much of the world, and later studies, such as Michael Rutter’s follow-up of Romanian orphans adopted into families, showed that a stable home in time repairs much of the damage. But children who grow up in institutions are not left without bonds: they give them to each other, like the Theresienstadt children or like Kakucho and Izana. Those ties can hold a kid up or pull him into a gang. What protects is not breaking them, but having adults who stay and better destinations for the loyalty that already exists.
Three key ideas
- Attachment theory (Bowlby, 1969-1980) holds that the child seeks a figure who protects him and builds with that figure the template for his relationships; if he loses it, he can attach to another, even another child (Freud and Dann, 1951), and grief has phases that can go wrong.
- Kakucho, the first of Tenjiku’s Four Heavenly Kings, was orphaned and found in Izana a king and a reason; he follows him into the war against Toman even though he opposes it, takes the gun from him at the end and survives because Izana takes the bullets for him.
- The crack: attachment explains his loyalty and his grief, not his obedience; at the end of the manga the same bond, with Izana alive, builds an organization that helps orphans.
Sources · further reading
- Bowlby, J. (1944). “Forty-Four Juvenile Thieves: Their Characters and Home-Life”. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 25, 19-53 and 107-128.
- Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and Loss, Vol. 1: Attachment. Hogarth Press.
- Bowlby, J. (1980). Attachment and Loss, Vol. 3: Loss: Sadness and Depression. Hogarth Press.
- Freud, A. and Dann, S. (1951). “An Experiment in Group Upbringing”. The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 6, 127-168.
- Bowlby, J. (1988). A Secure Base. Routledge.
- Wakui, K. (2017-2022). Tokyo Revengers, chapters 128-186, 196, 227 and 278. Kodansha (Weekly Shōnen Magazine).
- Liden Films (2023). Tokyo Revengers: Tenjiku-hen (the anime’s third season).
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
Who is Kakucho?
Kakucho is a villain from Tokyo Revengers, analysed on KRIMINIS through the lens of criminology. Behind an orphanage, a boy with a scarred face is making a dirt grave for his parents.
Why does Kakucho become a villain?
Kakucho, Tenjiku’s strongest fighter in Tokyo Revengers, and attachment theory (Bowlby): an orphan who made another orphan his king, his family and his reason. He followed him to war and, in the end, took his gun away.
Which criminological theory explains Kakucho?
Kakucho's case is analysed through Attachment. Attachment theory (John Bowlby, 1969-1980) holds that a child needs a figure who protects him and builds with that figure the template for all his relationships; if he loses it, he looks for another, and grief has its phases. Kakucho, the first of Tenjiku’s Four Heavenly Kings in Tokyo Revengers, was orphaned by an accident and found Izana Kurokawa at the orphanage, who gave him a king and a purpose. That bond takes him to war against Toman, makes him complicit in what he keeps quiet about and, at the last moment, makes him knock the gun out of Izana’s hand.
