Takeomi Akashi: The vice president who kept collecting after the gang was gone

Rain begins to fall on the night Brahman and Rokuhara Tandai meet face to face, in chapter 212 of Ken Wakui’s Tokyo Revengers manga. The tall man with a vertical scar down his face who speaks for Brahman is Takeomi Akashi. Facing South Terano, the rival leader, he surprises everyone: he has not come to fight, but to recruit Takemichi Hanagaki. When Kakucho, who now serves South, steps in, Takeomi asks him whether Izana would have approved; Kakucho answers with another name, Shinichiro’s, and Takeomi gets angry. Then, without losing his composure, he says one more name: Senju. His younger sister, Brahman’s president, bursts in, throws an umbrella at South and lands a kick on his head. In the whole conversation, Takeomi has not thrown a single punch. He has handled names. Who he is: founder and vice president of the first Black Dragon, the gang of Shinichiro, Mikey’s older brother; in 2008, the timeline Takemichi leaps to in the Three Deities arc, he is the number two of Brahman, one of the three gangs that rule Tokyo; and in the 2018 future that opens the Bonten arc (chapter 196) he appears as the advisor of Bonten, Mikey’s criminal organization, alongside his brother Haruchiyo Sanzu. (Spoiler warning: this case file covers the end of the Three Deities arc and the last chapter of the manga, which the anime has not yet adapted.)

// The theoryThe capital you cannot carry in your pocket

In 1986, Pierre Bourdieu defined social capital as the resources a person obtains by belonging to a lasting network of relationships: a credit the group extends to each member, which with effort can be converted into money or power. Two years later, James Coleman (1988) gave the version criminology has used most: social capital does not reside in people but in the structure of their relationships (obligations, trust, information channels, norms), and so it serves whatever ends the group chooses. Robert Sampson took it to neighborhoods with collective efficacy. Bill McCarthy and John Hagan looked at the other side. In a study of young people living on the street in Canada (1995), they showed that embeddedness in criminal networks gives access to tutors who teach the trade, which they called criminal capital. In 2001, again with street youth, they found that those who earned the most from selling drugs were the ones with the most capital: a desire for money, a willingness to take risks, competence and the ability to cooperate with others. On the street, too, people get ahead through contacts, reputation and partners.

// The subjectThe advisor who does not fight

The series makes his method clear in three moments of the Three Deities arc. In chapter 215, outside Draken’s motorcycle shop, Draken pins him against a wall for trying to recruit Takemichi and the former members of Toman. Takeomi explains that Brahman exists to defeat the Kanto Manji Gang, and as he leaves he tells Draken the heart of it: he wants to beat Mikey’s gang, but he does not want to fight Mikey, and that is why he recruits Mikey’s old friends. In chapter 218 he goes with Senju to a meeting with a businessman who wants to hire Brahman’s muscle. When she threatens to ruin him if his company gets involved in prostitution, Takeomi reminds her on the way out that the man is a client, and gives her a lesson: what separates an adult from a child is not letting emotions make the decisions, and Mikey knows how to do that. The third moment contradicts him. In chapter 224, after Draken’s death, it is Takeomi who loses his temper: he swears revenge on Rokuhara Tandai, orders Benkei to gather the whole gang and drags Brahman into war even though Senju tells him they are not ready. The cool-headed strategist sends his gang into a battle out of rage and, in chapter 225, fights his own way through toward South.

// The crackBorrowed capital

The theory explains his rise and, even better, his fall. In chapter 229, Senju charges at South and her brother begs her to stop: she cannot win, and the veterans are what has kept her in place. In the middle of the fight, she remembers how her strength, which brought in money, had awakened Takeomi’s ambition, and that she had held herself back for fear of that ambition. She knocks South out and declares herself Brahman’s true boss. In chapter 230, Takeomi looks back on his life. As a child he thought of himself as ordinary; Shinichiro was the charismatic one, and Takeomi admits that the God of War’s success was not his alone. When Shinichiro disbanded the Black Dragon, Takeomi went on living off its name; after years of luxury, his influence faded and the debts remained. It was Senju who, when he had nothing, gave him a place in her new gang. Coleman would have put it this way: social capital belongs to no one; it belongs to the relationship. When the relationship breaks, the name loses its value. And Alejandro Portes (1998) added its negative side: networks also allow excessive claims on their members, like those of an older brother who lives off his sister’s strength.

Explaining Takeomi is not excusing him. The theory says why he is worth what he is worth; it does not say why he chooses to spend it this way. As Senju recalls in chapter 241, Takeomi made Haruchiyo, the middle brother, answer for what she did as a little girl; the boy grew tired of taking the blame and told Senju he no longer wanted to talk to her. In the Bonten future, the two brothers end up in the same place, serving Mikey: Sanzu as executioner and Takeomi as advisor. And in the final timeline (chapter 278), once the tragedies have been undone, Senju and Haruchiyo are famous YouTubers and Takeomi introduces himself as their producer; Chifuyu remarks that he has a habit of spending his siblings’ money. Not even in the happy world does he change trades. He still lives off other people’s names, only now it is legal.