Yasuhiro Muto (Mucho): The man who punished traitors and became one

In the Tenjiku arc of Tokyo Revengers, Toman’s First Division gathers at Takemichi Hanagaki’s house to prepare for the war against Tenjiku. A car horn sounds. A car is waiting outside, and inside it is Yasuhiro Muto, “Mucho,” captain of the Fifth Division. Chifuyu warns that this is bad news: Mucho holds a special position in the gang. His men pin down Takemichi’s friends and he beats Takemichi to the ground, even though fighting between members is forbidden in Toman (manga chapters 138-139; anime episode 40). Takemichi wakes up tied up in a warehouse, next to Inupi and Koko, who have been beaten too. Mucho, a judoka, huge and unusually calm for a delinquent, is the captain Mikey gave a unique assignment: his division may fight inside the gang itself to punish traitors, even without the leader’s permission. In the warehouse he confesses that the traitor is him. He is one of the founders of Tenjiku, Izana Kurokawa’s gang, and from that moment Toman is his enemy. This case file also covers his ending (spoilers ahead).

// The theoryThe question turned around

In Causes of Delinquency (1969), Travis Hirschi turned criminology’s question around. Instead of looking for what pushes someone to offend, he asked what holds the rest of us back, since we could do it too. His answer, based on thousands of questionnaires from California teenagers, was the social bond: delinquency appears when a person’s tie to conventional society loosens or breaks, and it needs no special motive. Hirschi broke that tie into four elements: attachment to people whose opinion matters to us, commitment to what we would lose by offending, involvement in activities that leave no time for anything else, and belief that the rules are legitimate. He added a controversial claim about gangs: the idea that delinquents have warm, intimate relationships with one another struck him as a romantic myth. In his view, their friendships were cold and brittle.

// The subjectThe gang’s police officer

Three moments define him. The first is the interrogation in the warehouse (chs. 140-142; episode 41). Mucho explains that Izana does not just want to bring Mikey down: he wants Koko’s talent for money, Kisaki’s brains and Mikey’s charisma to build the most powerful criminal syndicate. So he gives Koko an ultimatum: either he joins Tenjiku or Mucho kills Inupi and Takemichi, whose face he stomps on as he says it. When Takemichi asks whether he is betraying Mikey, he answers that it might have been different if he had met him first. Koko gives in to save his friends. The second comes in the battle against Toman in Yokohama (chs. 160-164; episodes 45 and 46). Mucho takes Inupi down with a judo throw while Izana tells Hanma why Mucho ended up in juvenile detention: he threw a man onto concrete and left him paraplegic. Then Angry, from Toman, knocks him down. Mucho remembers the day he swore loyalty to Mikey, but also Izana’s order to kill someone, and he pulls a knife. Kakucho, Izana’s other great loyalist, steps in, stops the blade and knocks him out with a punch so that Tenjiku will not ruin him. The third is the end of the battle: Mucho weeps at Toman’s resolve, wonders what Izana really wanted and, when it is all over, tells Mikey to leave, because the S-62 will stay behind (chs. 167 and 179).

// The crackA bond that was not cold

Mucho refutes the most disputed part of Hirschi. His bond with Izana is neither cold nor brittle: it is born in a juvenile detention center, survives years apart and, as soon as Izana returns, outweighs his captaincy. Later research sides with the series: Peggy Giordano, Stephen Cernkovich and M. D. Pugh (1986) found that the friendships of delinquent teenagers were no less intimate than those of other teenagers. Control theory explains well why what ties us down holds us back. It explains less well the case where what ties us down pushes toward crime, and for that we also need to look at what is learned inside the group. And there is one more irony. Mucho was Toman’s instrument of control, the one who punished disloyalty. (Manga spoiler.) In the timeline that leads to Bonten, half a year after the battle, Mucho is released and finds Haruchiyo Sanzu waiting for him: his vice-captain, whom he had treated as a younger brother. Sanzu takes him to the pier where the battle was fought and kills him with a katana for betraying Mikey (ch. 206). It is the code Mucho enforced, carried out against him.

Explaining Mucho is not excusing him. The man he left paralyzed, Takemichi beaten in his own home and the knife he drew on Izana’s orders are his decisions, not side effects of a bond. But the manga suggests that a bond can change direction. In the final timeline (chs. 277-278), when Takemichi and Mikey rewrite the past, Mucho is among those who are saved, and Izana has turned Tenjiku into a nonprofit organization that helps orphans. Mucho works there as a volunteer. He still follows the same king, but that king now points somewhere else.