| Yutaka Kazami |
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Yutaka Kazami was a pastry chef who took part in Issei Tenkai's confectionery contest in 2000. He specialized in making candy into various shapes by using candy pumps to fill them with air and then molding them.
IS-7 Incident
- Main article: IS-7 Incident
The contest
Kazami and Hyōdō with their sons.
At some point prior to 2000, Kazami was afflicted with ageusia, a medical condition that robbed him of his sense of taste. This was devastating to a man striving to become the world's greatest pastry chef. He then heard about a confectionery competition hosted by the famous television chef Issei Tenkai at his mansion. The prize for the competition was the "Angel's Recipe", a book containing procedures for making cutting-edge pharmaceutical drugs that were as-yet unreleased to the public. Kazami decided to participate in the contest after learning that it contained a recipe for a particular drug that would cure him of his affliction. The contest required that competitors' creations excelled not only in taste, but in style as well. This was a problem for Kazami, as although his works tasted delicious, he had trouble getting his designs to come out properly.
Isaku Hyōdō was an acquaintance of Kazami's due to their two sons being close friends that attended the same elementary school. The two men decided to collaborate on the contest; Kazami would put the ingredients together, while Hyōdō, a sculptor by trade, sculpted the confections into marvellous designs. Their plan worked, and both reached the semifinal of the competition. Kazami never told Hyōdō about his condition, as his ability to create delicious foodstuffs was the only thing keeping him in the competition, and so Kazami instead had his son taste the desserts for him.
Betrayal and murder
Before the final round of the contest, Kazami created two batches of sherbet for Hyōdō to sculpt and brought them to him. However, with everything he needed for his last dessert, Hyōdō told Kazami that he was breaking their collaboration and not sculpting the latter's entry; Kazami was on his own. To make matters worse, Kazami's son hadn't turned up to help him that day (unbeknownst to him, Hyōdō had forced his own son to tie up Kazami's child). Kazami was left with the ingredients, but neither the taste nor aesthetic ability to win the competition.
Hyōdō threatening Kazami.
In desperation, Kazami rushed to Tenkai's room, where the recipe book was kept, and found a camera. If he couldn't win the cure for his condition, he would just photograph the recipe. However, Hyōdō entered the room and caught him in the act. He looked at the page that Kazami was photographing and figured out about Kazami's condition. Kazami was enraged and tried to hit Hyōdō, but the latter landed the first blow, and Kazami hit his head on a rock salt lamp, staining it with his blood. Mocking his former collaborator, Hyōdō threatened not only to expose his attempt at theft, but also to reveal his condition to the world, unless Kazami paid Hyōdō a large sum of cash. Kazami grabbed the other rock salt lamp in the room and bludgeoned Hyōdō to death.
Kazami initially hid the body inside Tenkai's dessert entry, a chocolate treasure chest beside a large chocolate ship. He then entered Hyōdō's room with the lamp with his blood on it, and rubbed it on the strings of a lyre that was part of a sherbet sculpture of Gemini to remove the blood. He then hid the lamps inside Delicy Scone's desert entry, intending to frame her, as he had learned that her entry was merely a thin layer of confectionery over a model base, and thus cheating. Knowing that Scone was having tea outside with Tenkai and his assistant Tsukasa Oyashiki, he thought to freeze Hyōdō's body inside the Gemini sculpture, obfuscating the time of death and thus hiding his involvement.
Later, Scone sneaked into Tenkai's room and sampled some of the desserts there, including the chocolate ship. Later, while Tenkai was judging Kazami's entry, the ship fell down and broke open the treasure chest below, causing Oyashiki to enter the room to investigate the noise, and discover the body. Kazami then moved Hyōdō to be frozen inside one of the sculptures as he had planned. Due to the early discovery of the body, Tenkai was arrested instead of Scone.
Aftermath
Kazami assisted detective Tyrell Badd and later Gregory Edgeworth, Tenkai's attorney, in their investigations of the crime. The sherbet sculptures later went missing, and it was presumed that they had melted. Kazami was initially suspected of melting the sculptures, but Oyashiki eventually admitted to doing so. Manfred von Karma, the lead prosecutor of the case, deliberately obstructed both Badd and Edgeworth so that neither would learn that the body had gone missing. When evidence that he had entered Holic's room was revealed, Kazami claimed that he had entered simply to retrieve a photo of him and Holic with their sons.
Tenkai's trial lasted a year, with Kazami leaving for Zheng Fa a week before the verdict. Due to a forged autopsy report, the trial ended with Tenkai being found guilty of being an accomplice to murder. The case, labelled the IS-7 Incident by the police, was left unresolved. Meanwhile, Kazami had not seen his son since before Hyōdō's betrayal, but abandoned any attempt to search for him (as, in his eyes, his son had betrayed him) to pursue his career.
Returning to the scene of the crime
- Main article: The Inherited Turnabout
Narrowly escaping death.
After three years of training in Zheng Fa, Kazami recovered from his condition and returned to the United States with vastly improved skills in December 2004 to win a dessert design contest and secure his place as a world-renowned pastry chef. Over 14 years later, Kazami found out that Oyashiki had bought Tenkai's mansion and turned it into an art gallery focusing on Holic's works. He learned that the very statue in which he had hidden Holic's body was to be one of the objects on display, and hence planned to retrieve it during the gallery's opening day. The statues were in the four rooms that had been used during the contest, with each room representing one of the four seasons.
Kazami entered the rightmost room, believing it to be the Winter Palace, and locked the door so that he could check the Gemini statue undisturbed. The lid of the glass casing was frozen shut, so he used a nearby gas burner to help open it. Unfortunately for Kazami, this was all a plot by Oyashiki to expose the true culprit of the IS-7 Incident. She had switched the Winter and Autumn Palaces and disguised the latter as the former. As Kazami opened the casing of what was really the Pisces statue, a poisonous gas was released. Kazami stumbled out of the door and lost consciousness. He was rushed to an infirmary inside the mansion.
After he recovered from the poison gas, Kazami found out that prosecutor Miles Edgeworth, son of Gregory Edgeworth, had begun investigating not only the truth behind the attempted murder, but also what had happened during the IS-7 Incident. Although Miles figured out what Oyashiki had done, he also began to suspect Kazami as Holic's killer. Unfortunately for the young prosecutor, there seemed to be no solid evidence tying Kazami to the crime, and thus he had to resort to a mixture of logic and manipulation to get anywhere in his investigation. Nonetheless, he soon determined the reasoning behind the pastry chef's visit to the gallery that day.
With the truth revealed, Kazami finally openly confessed to his crime, but pointed out that, since 18 years and 4 months had passed since Holic's death, the statute of limitations for the case had expired. Even the fact that the statute had been extended by three years due to his time abroad in Zheng Fa was not enough. Kazami was thus certain of his victory over the prosecutor, until the latter revealed a gaping hole in his plan: Tenkai had only been convicted as an accomplice, which meant that the statue of limitations would have been extended by the length of Tenkai's trial if the true killer remained undiscovered. Therefore, the statute of limitations was now over 19 years, and thus had not expired. Kazami was finally arrested for his crime, and Tenkai's name was cleared.
Personality
Mugshot in 2000.
Mugshot in 2019.
Yutaka Kazami had one purpose in life: to become the world's greatest pastry chef. He determinedly pursued this objective via regular training, and would frequently burn and scar himself in the process. One such scar crossed from his cheek, over his left eye, and cut partway into his chef's hat. His wearing of red was intended to help hide his injures. In his thirties, his creations never turned out the way he wanted, but after his training in Zheng Fa this greatly changed for the better. He was even able to create a life-size candy effigy of himself, right down to the stitches in his clothes.
Kazami generally came across as a calm and reserved man who had a habit of going into a meditative state. However, this supposed meditation was simply a ruse that Kazami employed when cornered in order to ignore other people. As he became older, he became more openly arrogant and prideful, with the additional habit of falling into bouts of maniacal laughter. He seemed to view other people solely in terms of their capacity to help him achieve his dream. No longer seeing a use for his own son after regaining his sense of taste, he laughed off his son's disappearance and made no attempt to find him before fleeing to Zheng Fa. Kazami held a great deal of respect for Tenkai and did not intend to have him take the fall, but the conviction did not seem to bother him much in the end.
Name
- His Japanese name means "full of flavor" (風味が豊か).
- Kazami's English name in the fan translation of Gyakuten Kenji 2 is "Dane Gustavia", with his last name sounding similar to "gustatory", which is a word used to refer to things associated with tasting or the sense of taste. "Dane" is the demonym for a citizen of Denmark, although in-game he is said to be Russian.
Development
- Kazami's older self has slightly darker skin and more scars than when he was younger.
- While the change in his candy creations from puppy to wolf and from chicken to phoenix are fairly self-explanatory, the change from seahorse to dragon would make more sense to a Japanese audience. This is because the Japanese word for a seahorse is "tatsunōtoshigo" (竜の落子), which roughly means "dragon children".