South Terano (Minami Terano): The giant who punches in fortissimo

It is night, and Draken is testing Mikey’s old motorcycle with Takemichi, freshly repaired. Then a motorcycle pulls up beside them with a passenger who did not choose the ride: Seishu Inui, bruised, dangling from the hand of a blond giant who steers with the other. The giant throws him onto the road, brakes, hums and calls for a nocturne. This is South Terano, representative of Rokuhara Tandai, and within seconds his bikers have them surrounded (chapters 210 and 211 of the manga). South asks Draken to join him. Draken answers that he has retired. South hits him, and keeps hitting him while shouting musical terms. Retiring, South explains, is unforgivable: the strongest stays the strongest until someone brings him down. So he gives him a choice: work under him or die right there. That is the entrance of the antagonist of the Three Deities arc (chapters 207-235), which begins when Takemichi, after the Bonten arc, leaps from 2018 to 2008. In that timeline Toman has been disbanded for two years, and Tokyo has been through a gang war that left three powers standing: Mikey’s Kanto Manji, Senju Kawaragi’s Brahman and South’s Rokuhara Tandai, with Kakucho, the Haitani brothers and Mocchi among its leaders. The anime’s fourth season, which premiered in October 2026, has only just begun adapting this arc, so this case file follows the manga. Warning: it reveals his ending.

// The theoryWhat was never learned: waiting

In A General Theory of Crime (1990), Michael Gottfredson and Travis Hirschi argued that crime does not need a thousand causes, only one. It is committed by people with low self-control, that is, people who tend to choose what feels good now even when it costs them dearly later. The authors describe that trait through six elements: impulsivity and a pull toward the immediate, a preference for easy and simple tasks, a taste for risk, a leaning toward physical rather than mental activity, self-centeredness and indifference to the suffering of others, and low tolerance for frustration, which shows up as a quick temper. Self-control, they argue, forms in childhood, roughly before the age of ten, when someone watches the child, recognizes misbehavior and corrects it; if that does not happen, the trait stays low and barely changes afterward. Combined with opportunity, it produces crime, along with fights, accidents and excess. The theory has drawn serious criticism, which we will get to, but Pratt and Cullen’s meta-analysis (2000) placed it among the strongest predictors of criminal behavior.

// The subjectThe boy who was paid to shoot

The manga shows him in three moments. The first is his past (chapter 227). Born Minami Terano, he grew up in Rio de Janeiro with a bedridden mother. Dino, the leader of a gang, looked after her and acted as his father, and it was Dino who, when South was five, ordered him to shoot some men he considered enemies; with the money, the boy bought new shoes, and Dino began calling him “South.” At twelve he beat Dino to death and inherited his gang; at fourteen, a raid by a rival gang killed his mother. Back in Japan, in juvenile detention, he beat the S-62 Generation one by one (the Haitani brothers, Shion, Mucho and Mocchi), and in 2007, after his release, he founded Rokuhara Tandai with the Haitani brothers, Shion and Mocchi; he recruited Kakucho by beating him in an alley. The second moment is the coldest. At the Trinity Land amusement park, some Rokuhara members who wanted to climb the ranks by killing Takemichi end up gunning down Draken, and in chapter 224 South beats the shooters for going too far and then, grinning, tells them they did well. The third is the battle of the Three Deities. Against Wakasa and Benkei, Brahman’s veterans, he gets up when he seemed beaten, takes off his uniform and shows the scars from the raid that killed his mother (chapter 228); he knocks them both down, calls out to Mikey, convinced Mikey understands him, and although Senju kicks him unconscious (chapter 229), he gets back up and floors her (chapters 230 and 231). That is when Mikey steps into the fight (chapters 232 and 233): he breaks the elbow of Takemichi, who tries to get between them, and beats South until he stops breathing.

// The crackAn urge with an agenda

The theory explains South’s temperament well, but it falls short of his biography. Low self-control describes someone who cannot put things off, and South puts a great deal off. In juvenile detention he decides that if he beats the generation that ruled Kanto, he will be number one; he gets out, builds a gang out of the men he defeated and travels to Tokyo with a declared goal, to defeat Toman and open a new era. Nor does he escape the classic objection of Ronald Akers (1991): if we measure low self-control by the tendency to give in to impulse and then use it to explain giving in, the reasoning goes in circles. And his childhood does not quite fit the model. Gottfredson and Hirschi speak of parenting that neither monitors nor corrects; South’s was worse, because an adult rewarded his first violence with money and a name. That looks more like learning than like a missing brake.

The end of the manga raises one more question. In the final timeline (chapter 278), South is alive, a heavyweight mixed martial arts champion who trains at Wakasa and Benkei’s gym whenever he visits Japan and, at Takemichi’s wedding, loudly challenges Mikey. The same appetite, inside a sport with rules. The manga does not say how he got there, but the image clashes with the stability the theory attributes to the trait. None of this excuses him in the 2008 timeline: explaining South is not excusing him. The beating of Draken and the praise for the men who killed him are his own decisions, however much he calls them urges.