Akiyama Goro was born into pain and poverty. All of his life, the world spit on him and kicked him while he was down. His father beat him, his brothers beat him, his teachers beat him. He rebelled against a world that held nothing but hostility for him, and found that his rebellion only made it more hostile. By the time he was a teenager, he had fallen in with a "yankii" crew, and was in and out of juvenile detention facilities and assigned to schools for delinquents. By the time he was 17, he had "graduated" from yankii to full fledged Yakuza.
As a yakuza enforcer, Goro quickly gained a reputation for violence. Called a Mad Dog, Goro was the one enforcer that no one wanted to see sent to their doorstep, because if he was present, things WERE going to escalate out of hand. Violence was his stock in trade and business was good. This, of course, led to a revolving door relationship with Japan's prison system. Being such a violent, brutish thug, though, it only carries you so far, and if you're in and out of prison, even the Yakuza finds that they have very little use of you. Goro's only real saving grace was his loyalty to his sworn brothers. That same loyalty, however, was used against him.
Goro and his brother were set up to perform a hit on the head of a rival family. At the last moment, Goro was given a phone call by his superiors and ordered to stay away from the hit. Unwilling to let his brother go in and face it alone, Goro defied his boss. He was captured in route, and sent to the family's torture dungeon to suffer for a year. They cut out his eye and beat him within an inch of his life, barely keeping him alive, but still Goro endured, all the while defying them and refusing to break. That defiance, and his lack of usefulness with no loyalty left, ended up in his execution. When the time finally came, all Goro could do was tell them to hurry his body to the doctor, because he had long ago sold off his internal organs for gambling money.
Goro laughed for the entire fall into the Hell of Being Skinned Alive.
He barely spent any time in Hell. He had been in kiddie prisons that had been more secure. When he took his Second Breath, Goro fell right back into his old habits. Only he wasn't so sly, or so good at them as a chih-mei. It didn't take long for the Infant Devil Civilizers to find him, but they soon regretted it. He took down a handful of them on his own with sheer savagery before chasing the others off. They called in the big guns, and the next day, Goro was greeted by a foul, decrepit old monk and his child "bride". He barely had time to let out a bellowing roar before they sent him to his first Little Death. They carted his body off to a defiled temple filled with bakemono and other unclean spirits in the middle of Aokigahara, Japan's Suicide Forest. There, they taught him about his new role in the cosmos, his duty to Heaven, and his role in the destruction of an unrighteous world.
He liked that just fine.
They told him that he could be wicked, indulge in pleasures of the flesh, get rich, and misbehave with all the violence he desired, as long as he kept it within the "bounds of propriety". He liked that just fine, too. The Devil-Tiger ideal of "propriety" covers an awful lot of ground.
After that, he was kicked out of the temple and left to his own devices. It didn't take long for him to get in with the Genji courts of Tokyo and become a glorified runner and leg-breaker for the higher ups in the Court. It also didn't take long for him to make new acquaintances within another yakuza syndicate, where he started earning his reputation back, gaining far more traction than he had in life. Using his connections among the yakuza, now Goro finds himself settling in a new land. One filled with hedonism, greed, wickedness and evil aplenty. Prospect, California. It's a great place to be a Devil, and within the fledgling Autumn Lotus Court, there is room for an enterprising spitfire like him to carve out a niche for himself, unlike the stuffy Genji and hoary Bishamon of Japan. Maybe he'll even find some enlightenment along the way.
