Lau Ka Long (born 1961) was the head of the Japanese branch of the Chinese Snake Flower Triad, based in Yokohama and Tokyo from the 1980s to 2010s.
Biography[]
Lau Ka Long was born in China, and he rose through the ranks of the Snake Flower Triad through force. He later emigrated to Japan and established the Triad's presence in the country by taking over Yokohama's underworld during the 1980s due to its large Chinese population. His organization extorted local businesses, forged passports and travel documents for undocumented immigrants, and was based out of a large Chinese restaurant in Yokohama's Chinatown district.
In 1993, he had the yakuza Kazuma Kiryu tortured after Kiryu attempted to muscle in on the Snake Flower Triad's passport forging business, but Kiryu was rescued by his adoptive father Shintaro Kazama, who killed two of Lau's guards. This created a long-standing rivalry between the Tojo-kai yakuza clan and the Snake Flower Triad, and Lau intervened in the 2005 Tojo Civil War with the objective of eclipsing the Tojo-kai as the dominant organized crime syndicate in Tokyo.
Lau was persuaded to enter the fray by Shimano-gumi patriarch Futoshi Shimano, who sought to seize control of the Tojo-kai for himself through recovering the clan's missing ¥10 billion. Lau was promised ¥3 billion by Shimano, who would take ¥5 billion for himself and give the remaining ¥2 billion to Omi Alliance patriarch Yukio Terada. Lau had the Bloody Eye gang kidnap Haruka Sawamura, the holder to the key of Kyohei Jingu's money in the form of her pendant.
Lau sold the pendant to Akira Nishikiyama, as Shimano found the pendant to be too expensive; shortly after, Kazuma Kiryu came to Yokohama to rescue Haruka, who was the niece of his adoptive sister Yumi Sawamura. Kiryu single-handedly defeated several of Lau's henchmen before fighting Lau himself; Lau wielded a spear and two swords against Kiryu at various points, but Kiryu was able to defeat Lau and rescue Haruka.
Lau's defeat in 2005 forced him to bide his time until a new opportunity arose to weaken the Tojo-kai. In 2007, he allied with Goh Hamazaki of the Hamazaki-gumi to take control of Yokohama in exchange for Hamazaki being granted control of a new resort which was to be built on Okinawa.
Lau's primary reason for allying himself with Hamazaki was to avenge his defeat at Kiryu's hands, and, in 2009, Kiryu once again confronted Lau after the Snake Flower Triad kidnapped another friend of his, Rikiya Shimabukuro. Kiryu once again defeated Lau, and Lau and his officers were then shot by the CIA agent Joji Kazama, with Lau supposedly dying after being shot in the left side of the head.
However, Lau survived his wounds and, using the alias of "Chau Ka Long", he became an underground weapons dealer in Isezakicho. Lau was so far removed from his past that he did not hear of the Tojo-kai's various civil wars and steep decline until 2019, when he was visited by an Arakawa-gumi yakuza, Ichiban Kasuga, who came to Lau in search of a business partner in his fight against Ryo Aoki's Bleach Japan and the Omi Alliance.