Goro Yoshida

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Goro Yoshida
Character information
Alias(es)	Yami Shogun
Age	59
Born	1943, Honshu, Japan
Died	c. June 2002, Imperial Hotel, Tokyo, Japan
Hair	Black; short, sprinkled with gray
Eyes	Dark
Dist. Features	Intricate red tattoo, depicting an ancient battle between samurai and dragons, covered 80% of his body.
Relatives	Unidentified (father) Yukiko Yoshida (sister)
Nationality	Japanese
Occupation	Yakuza leader, ultranationalist terrorist
Affiliation	Ryujin-kai, Yonai Enterprises
Status	Deceased; Seppuku
Behind the scenes
Role	Main villain
First seen	Never Dream of Dying
Last seen	The Man with the Red Tattoo

"The Japanese who are co-operating with Western countries deserve to die. Japan needs to remain pure. To retain the former glory that she once enjoyed, we must hold our noses and swallow our medicine. As the great poet and novelist Yukio Mishima wrote, ‘Glory, as anyone knows, is bitter stuff.’"

― Goro Yoshida.

Goro Yoshida (Japanese: 吉田 吾朗) was a fictional Japanese ultranationalist terrorist and Yami Shogun of the Ryujin-kai. A recurring antagonist, the character was first introduced in Raymond Benson's 2001 James Bond continuation novel, Never Dream of Dying, and served as the primary villain of the 2002 book, The Man with the Red Tattoo.

Biography

Early life

The eldest of two siblings, Goro Yoshida was born to a prosperous Japanese family of industrialists in 1943. By the time Goro was thirteen he and his friend Tsukamoto were involved in various levels of a Tokyo yakuza called Ryujin-kai. Initially despising his family for their involvement in Western big business, Goro found respect for his father after the elder Yoshida perished circa 1963 whilst serving in the nationalistic terrorist group, the Red Guard. It was also during this time Goro and Tsukamoto discovered the work of controversial nationalist writer, Yukio Mishima. Goro inherited his father's fortune and businesses; consolidating their industrial and chemical engineering firms into "Yonai Enterprises".

During the mid-to-late 1960s, Yoshida drove Yonai to became the leader in chemical engineering and became increasingly involved in militant nationalism; including a brief stint in the private army of his idol, Yukio Mishima, cut short due to his yakuza connections. In 1970, Mishima committed public seppuku - prompting Goro to form his own private army of nationalists, modelled after Mishima's Shield Society. Eventually Goro Yoshida became the Yami Shogun, the Dark Lord, of the Ryujin-kai and in the 1980s began a systematic global bombing campaign of Western companies dubbed the "New Offensive". Now a wanted man like his father before him, Yoshida went into hiding, operating Yonai from afar through a puppet president.

Never Dream of Dying

From his secret military base in the disputed Kuril Islands of Russia, Goro Yoshida supplies The Union with a steady supply of trained troops for their various operations. In return for the troops, The Union aids Yoshida in executing his plan of bombing the Cannes film festival in France as an attack on the "decadence of the west". Yoshida chooses the film industry as a target because he believes that this will leave the largest impact on "the west", who in his opinion value movie stars more than anything.