Kaoru Ichinose was the Japanese Vice-Minister for Health during the 2010s, preceding Reiko Kusumoto. In January 2019, he was arrested for masterminding a series of murders related to the AD-9 conspiracy, an attempt by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare to cover up the drug's failures until Yoji Shono could perfect it and thus keep the ADDC, Ichinose's passion project, open.
Biography[]
Kaoru Ichinose was born in Tokyo, Japan, and he worked as a physician before entering politics with the LDP. He became a member of the House of Representatives, and, in 1998, he founded the Medical Institute and, four years later, the Advanced Drug Development Center on the institute's land. While Ichinose outwardly had altruistic motives to support patients with Alzheimer's, he was alleged to have created the ADDC to secure cushy retirement positions for himself and other politicians. By the time of the Great Recession in 2007, the reversal of Japan's aging crisis and financial constraints threatened to close the ADDC, whose vice-director Toru Hashiki was bribed by land developer Shigeru Kajihira to sabotage it to death during the 2010s. However, Yoji Shono's development of an Alzheimer's cure, AD-9, gave the ADDC new hope. Even after Shono accidentally killed patient Koichi Waku during an illegal clinical test in 2015, Ichinose decided to cover this up and support Shono's efforts to develop AD-9, hoping that it would save the ADDC from closure. Sure enough, ADDC director Ryusuke Kido's announcement of AD-9 in 2017 brought new funding to the ADDC, angering Kajihira.
Shono, Kido, and Ichinose in 2018
After Hashiki threatened to reveal AD-9's lethality to humans, Ichinose had his underling Mitsuru Ishimatsu approach the yakuza captain Kyohei Hamura and have him send the hitman Mitsuru Kuroiwa to assassinate Hashiki, which was achieved in the summer of 2018. When Shono requested test subjects for AD-9, Ichinose had Hamura send Kuroiwa to kidnap Kyorei-kai yakuza for testing at Shono's secret lab in Kabukicho, Tokyo. After all the subjects died, Kuroiwa gouged out their eyes, whose blue pigmentation was a telltale sign of AD-9's toxicity; for this reason, he was nicknamed "the Mole" once the murders hit the headlines.
Private detective Takayuki Yagami took up an interest in the murders after helping prove Hamura's innocence in Kyorei-kai gangster Toshiro Kume's murder in December 2018, and his coworker Masamichi Shintani, looking to one-up him, learned from Hamura of Shono's involvement in the murder and decided to pursue that lead. When Ichinose discovered this, he forced Hamura to kill Shintani without pay. Yagami discovered Shono's identity from Shintani's cell phone, leading him to visit the ADDC several times in an attempt to find Shono and his superiors and ask them about Shintani's murder. Ichinose met Yagami on several occasions, and he eventually threatened to file a complaint with the Bar Association about Yagami's behavior. He finally did so after Yagami and Fumiya Sugiura returned to the ADDC for their investigation, and, a few days later, he called security on Yagami when he and Sugiura returned. After Yagami discovered the secret lab in Kabukicho, Ichinose intervened, persuading chief prosecutor Kunihiko Morita not to investigate, as it was supposedly a classified facility. Morita, who sympathized with the AD-9 conspirators, ultimately decided not to search the facility as Yagami suggested, enabling Shono to get away with murder.
In January 2019, prosecutor Keigo Izumida persuaded Ichinose to testify at detective Kazuya Ayabe's trial, where he would explain the history and effects of AD-9. Sensing a trap, Ichinose conjured up a plan with Ishimatsu in case incriminating evidence against him was found. At the trial, Yagami confronted Ichinose about Shintani's phone call to Shono, and he brought in Hamura to testify against Ichinose when Ichinose insisted that Yagami's evidence was merely hearsay. Hamura revealed a recorded conversation with Ichinose in which Ichinose ordered Shintani's murder, leading Ichinose to send Ishimatsu to arrange Kuroiwa's death. Ichinose was promptly removed from the courtroom, and, while Kuroiwa evaded murder by the hitmen, he was shot by police while attempting to kidnap Shono from the ADDC. Ichinose was arrested for his involvement with AD-9 not long after Ayabe's acquittal for Kuroiwa's crimes.