Junya Kaneshiro

Junya Kaneshiro is a character from Persona 5.

Appearances

 * Persona 5: Major Character

Design
Kaneshiro is a short and overweight man with long brown hair. He normally wears the typical cheap suit of a higher-up in organized crime and typically wears golden jewelry.

Shadow Kaneshiro has violet skin, wears a silver business suit and has a mustache. When he transforms into Bael, his eyes become large orange compound ones and he grows insect wings, developing some fly-like behaviors (constantly twitching and rubbing his hands together). In the second phase of his fight he converts his Palace's main safe into Piggytron, a mech resembling a piggy bank, to pilot. Piggytron itself has several weapons like machine guns and missiles, and can retract its limbs to become a ball that Bael will roll at the Phantom Thieves.

Personality
Kaneshiro is a ruthless, callous, and greedy crime lord, obsessed with wealth and money. He even dedicates a giant room that filled with a large amount of money which disturbs Ryuji Sakamoto and disgusts Makoto Niijima. Makoto claims he's "nothing but a disgusting fly swarming to dirty money" and a "money-grubbing asshole". He claims has a tendency to spend money to calm himself down, then blackmailing the persons responsible for his stress to recoup the loss.

His Shadow Self (who, like the other targets, is nearly identical to his real-world identity) later reveals that he believes that selflessness is a weakness with no place in monetary matters, a philosophy he picked up when he was a much poorer man. He has something of a victim complex, viewing society's prejudice towards the overweight and poor as responsible for driving him to a life of crime.

As with other Targets, he is themed after one of the Seven Deadly Sins, in his case Gluttony; Junya is already wealthy beyond any real desire for higher living and spends only as much as he needs to in order to remain at his socioeconomic bracket and run his branch of the Yakuza, but demands more and more money for the sake of having it (differing from Greed, as he doesn't actually desire to do anything with his finances, as opposed to Kunikazu Okumura, who has actual ambitions and goals in mind).

Persona 5
Kaneshiro is a Yakuza oyabun (the equivalent of a Mafia boss) who rose in the criminal underworld through clever use of blackmail. He thinks of himself as a businessman and a banker, as revealed in his Palace, a floating bank. The Phantom Thieves of Hearts plan a heist at the Kaneshiro's Palace to steal his heart under Makoto's request to prove their justice, or else she will reveal to everyone the recording that proves them to be the Phantom Thieves. When the Thieves have difficulty locating him, Makoto risks herself by asking Kaneshiro's henchmen of his whereabouts, prompting the Thieves to follow her. This leads Kaneshiro to blackmail them by taking their pictures in his club and threatens to leak it to their school unless they pay him 3 million yen within 3 weeks.



During the fight with Shadow Kaneshiro, he initially fights the Phantom Thieves on foot as Bael, but after being weakened he realizes he cannot fight the Thieves directly, activating Piggytron, his treasury in the form of a gigantic metal piggy bank. At several points in the fight Bael will convert the mech into a ball-like form and then hop on top of it, rolling it at the party for massive amounts of damage. The Thieves must damage Bael enough while he is gathering speed to knock him off, causing him to lose control of Piggytron and end up flattening himself (though he recovers quickly and hops back in). Near the end of the fight, Morgana realizes that as a Shadow, Bael possesses no self-control, and tells one of the Thieves to toss him a valuable item, which tricks Bael into ignoring the Thieves while he examines his new possession and allowing them to finally destroy Piggytron.

After the Thieves defeat Shadow Kaneshiro, he reveals there is a third party other than them who has the ability to manipulate the Palace for his own ends without caring about what happened to the people in reality.soon afterward he later call Makoto that he cancel the their debt and delete the photo of them presence in club and turn himself in to the police

Battle Quotes

 * "Hehehehe! Bein' young is such a crime! They're naive, they're reckless, and on top of that, they don't even realize how stupid they are. Now I couldn't just sit back and not cash in on those idiots, right?"
 * "Eat this!"
 * "Stop whimpering like a baby!"
 * "Ahahaha! Yeh're just gonna keep goin' at this to the bitter end, huh? No more games then. I ain't gonna forgive yeh punks for this."
 * "Ngh... Aaagh... D-Dammit...! Yeh goddamn punks...!"
 * "Tch... The hell? Yeh punks're stronger than you look... Looks like I gotta bring out my big guns...!"
 * "Hehehe... We'll see about that... Time to roll out...! Here he is... My guardian robot! Gyahahahahaha! Yeh ready to die!? It ain't a pig, yo! This is my Palace's swine-model defensive mechanoid, Piggytron! Goin' against me's a real bad crime, yeh know? It's time for yeh all to go to hell!"

Etymology
Jun (潤) is usually for composing phrases like "profit" (利潤) or "damp" (湿潤); Ya (矢) means "arrow". Kaneshiro (金城) means "castle of money/gold".

Trivia

 * In the Japanese version, the exact phrase used by Makoto to label Kaneshiro "money-grubbing asshole" is "narikin" (成り金) which means "upstart". When the two kanjis are reversed, it looks very similar to Kaneshiro's surname (金城) and also the kanjis of "" and "" share the same Sino-Japanese pronunciations, namely "jō" and "sei".
 * Kaneshiro's Japanese voice actor, Kazunari Tanaka, is the second voice talent who died of sickness around the initial release date of the game. The first is Chihaya Mifune's voice actress, Miyu Matsuki. Atlus Japan's Persona announcement Twitter account issued a eulogy to Tanaka's sudden death at the age of 49 on 11 October 2016.
 * Bael's battle theme is initially the miniboss theme on foot, but it becomes the normal boss theme once Butaron is activated.
 * In human form, Shadow Kaneshiro speaks in a stereotypically upper-class and clear fashion, but as Bael he reverts to a more casual vernacular and frequent use of slang.