"These scroundrels have threatened me. Aren't the police supposed to side with law-abiding citizens?"
Kunikazu Okumura is a character from Persona 5.
Appearances
- Persona 5: Major Character
Design
Kunikazu is a bespectacled older man who wears a business suit over an orange and brown checkerboard undershirt.
Shadow Kunikazu wears a mostly black, form-fitting spacesuit with the same colors as his undershirt, and has blue skin. Unlike most bosses, he does not have a demon form-as Mammon, he calls out a floating chair before radioing a group of robots to protect him.
Personality
""Overcome failure at any cost, even if it means betraying others.""
Kunikazu is an ambitious and career-focused professional who is always chasing his next victory. Unfortunately for his daughter, his ambitions come with a complete and wilful ignorance of the pain he causes to his company or his family; no matter how many scandals Okumura Foods faces due to its poor safety practices and punishing work hours, or how obviously unhappy Haru is with his manipulations, Kunikazu refuses to let his nobler passions influence his business, instead behaving as ruthlessly as he feels he must to get ahead in the world. In fact, his Shadow Self admits that he sees nothing wrong with using Haru as a political pawn, as he believes it is his right as a parent to direct her life for the good of her family (ie, himself), and grows upset when he realizes Haru is "betraying" him by helping the Phantom Thieves of Hearts invade his Palace (although his Shadow seems to believe she is simply acting out and attempts to convince her to side with him repeatedly before his boss fight). Despite his cold attitude, he is not completely heartless; as revealed as the Theives explore the Palace, Kunikazu secretly realizes how miserable his employees are but suppresses his guilt, and realizes he is not a good parent. Eventually, during the confrontation with Shadow Kunikazu to acquire the Treasure, he admits that the Thieves are probably right to want to change his heart, but still fights back out of fear of losing the wealth he sacrificed his conscience to achieve.
He is also somewhat immature in his tastes, having been inspired for the Big Bang Burger franchise by a model kit he loved as a boy, but could never afford until he achieved success and paid off his own father's loans. Politically, it can be assumed he is a nationalist, as his Shadow reveals he believes he is helping achieve "utopia" by helping Masayoshi Shido achieve his goal of being elected to Prime Minister.
Profile
Persona 5
Kunikazu is the father of Haru Okumura. He is the president of Okumura Foods, which is also the owner of the fast food manufacturer and chain, Big Bang Burger. He is one of the heist targets of the Phantom Thieves of Hearts at his own Palace. Initially prosecutor Sae Niijima notices Okumura's fast food business heavily benefits from his rivals' deaths from the mysterious mental meltdown staged by the Conspiracy, a fact that is learned by the thieves after hacking into Sae's laptop. After the Medjed incident, Okumura's heist request ranking in the Phantom Aficionado Website suddenly surges with loads of comments against his business practices. The Phantom Thieves are initially indecisive about reforming Okumura, but settle down when Haru joins them to escape her doomed marriage.
His Palace is a space station formed from his desire for wealth, to manipulate his employees and his childhood memory of enjoying sci-fi shows and toys, but also his refusal to acknowledge how much he is hurting Haru with his greed, tacitly oblivious to what kind of person her arranged fiance Sugimura is due to the promise of Haru marrying into wealth. His stepping stone to political power is done by sacrificing Haru's happiness, as is reflected by his Palace having a self-destruct and escape pod; he desires to exist in complete ignorance of every negative consequence of his actions, despite the fact that he is fully aware of how miserable his employees are and has his suspicions about Sugimura.
Shadow Kunikazu "transforms" into Mammon in the Palace. Initially, he tries to subdue the Phantom Thieves by tricking them into separating from Haru and capturing the rest by pretending to have already reformed, but Morgana manages to escape the force field and hits the remote control he was using with the slingshot. During his boss fight, he is sitting on a flying chair and summons a group of his Cognitive existences, robots who represent how he sees his employees as emotionless drones. Recognizing he is not nearly strong enough to beat the Phantom Thieves directly, he activates a thirty-minute self-destruct timer and hangs back while his robots attack the party, he casting support spells at the end of the combat round. Once several waves of his bots are defeated, he is defeated in one or two hits and surrenders, deactivating the timer.
Because he is shown to genuinely care about Haru and regularly feels deeply conflicted about his obligation to his business and his daughter, the Phantom Thieves come to respect him as an opponent. When his Treasure is stolen, he attempts to reveal the identity of the head of the conspiracy that had manipulated him but the Thieves are forced to retreat because of the tight time limit. When the Shadow Self is alone, Goro Akechi kills the Shadow according to the plan, causing him to messily die on national television and badly traumatizing Haru, who comes to blame herself for the rest of the game.
His heist request is manipulated by the Conspiracy by hacking into the Phan-site and pushing the heist request for Kunikazu, baiting the Phantom Thieves into the accusation of series of murders. Futaba Sakura, the Thieves' hacker, later discovers this and concludes that the said hacker is the same who imposes as Medjed and has been harassing the Phantom Thieves before her intervention.
When the Phantom Thieves infiltrate Shido's Palace, the Shadow Self of the TV station president reveals that Kunikazu is assassinated despite his donations because the scandals around his company has attracted media coverage which is beyond their power to cover up and they fear exposure of their conspiracy.
Strategy
To be written.
Stats
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Gallery
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Etymology
Kunikazu (邦和) can loosely mean "international peace/diplomacy". Okumura (奥村) means "abstruse/deep-village".
Trivia
- Shadow Kunikazu's costume is very reminiscent of the super villains in the 1980s science fictions. The panel before his torso is particularly similar to Darth Vader's from the Star Wars franchise.
- Shadow Kunikazu's plot to escape to utopia in a flying saucer and destroy everything left behind is a call back to the Millennium Kingdom project from Shin Megami Tensei II and Xibalba/Ameno Torifune from Persona 2.