Juro Horinouchi was Superintendent General of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department during the 2010s. In 2019, he was arrested after it was discovered that he and several other high-ranking Tokyo public officials had received hefty bribes from yakuza boss Masumi Arakawa.
Biography[]
Horinouchi in 2000
Juro Horinouchi was born in Yokohama, Kanagawa Prefecture. He served in the Kanagawa Prefectural Police, but, like many other provincial policemen who feared that their department's ties to the Ijin Three syndicate might prevent them from being promoted, Horinouchi coveted a transfer to the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department. Horinouchi framed an innocent man for a double homicide and ignored testimony that proved the man's innocence, resulting in his imprisonment and later suicide. When his subordinate Koichi Adachi leaked this information to the public, Horinouchi used his influence with the Public Security Bureau to cover up the leak and reassigned Adachi to being a driving instructor. Horinouchi would receive his promotion and rise from being Chief of the TMPD Personnel and Training Bureau to Senior Commissioner and, by the 2010s, Superintendent General.
During the late 2010s, Governor Ryo Aoki approached Horinouchi with a proposal to crush the Tojo-kai yakuza syndicate; unbeknownst to Horinouchi, Aoki was the alias of a former acquaintance of his, Masato Arakawa, whose love interest Yumeno he had stolen in 2000. Aoki, the son of Arakawa-gumi crime boss Masumi Arakawa, blackmailed his father into leaking Tojo Clan information to Horinouchi that enabled the vicious enactment of the Kabukicho 3K Plan, which effectively drove the Tojo out of Tokyo's Kabukicho district from 2017 to 2019. Horinouchi also received bribes from Arakawa to allow the Omi Alliance to move into Tokyo without resistance, and Horinouchi provided some of these bribes to his allies on the police force.
In 2019, as Aoki schemed to become LDP party chair and oversee a snap election victory, Adachi partnered with ex-yakuza Ichiban Kasuga to investigate Horinouchi's ties to organized crime and thwart Aoki's plot. Horinouchi's relationship with Aoki was strained after the Governor ordered the assassination of Seiryu-kai boss Ryuhei Hoshino in Yokohama, and, while he advised Aoki to stay away from the Millennium Tower after Kasuga attempted to bait him into a trap by claiming to be in possession of an incriminating tape against him, Aoki ignored his advice and would be defeated in a fight with Kasuga. Horinouchi sent his police to the tower to break up the fight, but Kasuga proved to them that Aoki had ordered the deaths of underworld opponents, leading to a failed arrest attempt.
Horinouchi's arrest
After Aoki was murdered by disillusioned supporter Sota Kume, Adachi focused on bringing Horinouchi to justice, meeting him on the rooftop of the TMPD's Kabukicho headquarters and revealing that he had discovered data in the Arakawa-gumi office that revealed Horinouchi's acceptance of bribes. Having already provided this information to the inspector-general and other higher-ups, Adachi watched as Horinouchi was apprehended.