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Seishiro Jigoku
I find the defendant, Ryunosuke Naruhodo... guilty!

Seishiro Jigoku was a Japanese judge during the Meiji period. He presided over Ryunosuke Naruhodo's trial for the murder of John Wilson and Rei Membami's trial for the murder of Jezaille Brett. He later traveled to England with an old colleague of his, Yujin Mikotoba, where he was a witness to the murder of Tobias Gregson.

Graveyard murder[]

Main article: Professor Killings

Sixteen years before the game's events, Seishiro Jigoku, along with fellow students Genshin Asogi and Yujin Mikotoba, traveled to Great Britain as part of an international exchange program. Six years into this study, Asogi was arrested on suspicion of being the Professor, a notorious serial killer that targeted the highest echelons of society, with witness testimony and evidence alike implicating him in the murder of his partner -- the Director of Prosecutions, Klint van Zieks. Klint's murder was believed to be the fifth committed by the Professor, despite the fact that it did not match the killer's previous modus operandi (a hunting dog, which Asogi lacked). During Asogi's trial, Jigoku provided testimony in an attempt to exonerate Asogi. He became agitated to the point of making numerous comments seen as offensive to Great Britain and destroying the witness' stand. Additionally, along with Mikotoba, Jigoku implored Asogi to allow them to help his case further by petitioning the government. However, Asogi refused their help, and also refused to deny the charges laid against him. Asogi was eventually convicted and sentenced to death.

This sentence proved to be a farce, as Asogi was instead the center of a conspiracy: while Asogi had been responsible for killing Klint van Zieks, he was not the serial killer known as the Professor. In reality, Klint himself was the serial killer and had been blackmailed into committing all murders save for his first by Mael Stronghart, another prominent prosecutor who had become aware of Klint's deed. Stronghart, behind the scenes, had convinced Gregson and Wilson to aid him in fabricating the evidence that was used to get Asogi arrested and convicted for being the Professor. This was a part of Stronghart's plan to conceal his role in the Professor killings, which required eliminating Asogi, who knew the truth, as a threat. While Asogi was imprisoned and pending trial, Stronghart paid him a visit to make him a deal: he would allow Asogi to live and return to his home country of Japan, if Asogi would accept the charges laid against him and be convicted of being the Professor. Asogi reluctantly agreed to this plan. On the night he was slated to be executed, he was instead buried alive in a coffin to be retrieved by Stronghart.

Shortly after Asogi's trial, Jigoku himself went through a trial over the witness' stand he destroyed. He was acquitted of criminal charges and was only fined for the cost of repairing the witness' stand. It was around this time that Jigoku was recruited into Stronghart's plot surrounding Asogi. Stronghart revealed that Asogi's execution was a farce, and that he would instead be buried alive in Lowgate Cemetery, the cemetery connected to Barclay Prison. For his plan, Stronghart needed Jigoku to help him retrieve Asogi and send him back to Japan. In exchange, Stronghart promised Jigoku that he would help him become the Japanese Minister of Foreign Affairs. Jigoku accepted the deal, seeing it as a great boon to himself.

The night of Asogi's fake execution, Stronghart and Jigoku went to Lowgate Cemetery to retrieve Asogi from his coffin. As they approached the plot where Asogi was buried, they encountered an unforeseen obstacle: Enoch Drebber, a local university student, who had been harvesting recently buried corpses from nearby cemeteries in order to sell them to hospitals for study. That night, Drebber dug up the plot in which Asogi had been buried, which caused him to witness what appeared to be Asogi rising from the dead. This terrified Stronghart: Drebber would almost certainly inform other people of what he had seen, endangering their secret operation and potentially informing all of London that Asogi had never died. With no choice but murder to conceal the secret, Stronghart coerced Jigoku into murdering his friend. Jigoku then shot Asogi in the chest, killing him and sending him falling back into his grave, which splattered blood all over Drebber and his camera. After Drebber fled in fear, Stronghart and Jigoku reburied Asogi and left the scene.

Jigoku, along with Yujin Mikotoba, was eventually summoned back to Japan following the Professor case. Despite the fact that the original plan to repatriate Asogi had gone terribly wrong, Stronghart still fulfilled the promise that he made to Jigoku: he helped Jigoku become the Minister of Foreign Affairs in Japan. While in this position, Jigoku helped out with the Anglo-Japanese Treaty of Friendship and Navigation.

Ten years after the Professor incident, Stronghart decided that John Wilson and Tobias Gregson's knowledge of the affair was too dangerous to let alone, and thus determined that the pair needed to die. To facilitate their deaths, Stronghart coerced Jigoku via telegram to help him once again -- this time, to organize an assassin exchange. Stronghart was to send an assassin named Asa Shinn (under the alias "Jezaille Brett") to Japan in order to murder John Wilson, while Jigoku was to send an assassin to Britain in order to murder Tobias Gregson. The reason for the exchange was to exploit jurisdiction restrictions: both of their chosen assassins would be able to escape punishment, as both would be repatriated back to their countries for their trials, where they could then be relieved of any penalty.

Judge career[]

Trial of Ryunosuke Naruhodo[]

Main article: The Adventure of the Great Departure

Seishiro Jigoku presided over the trial of Ryunosuke Naruhodo when he was accused of murdering university professor John Wilson. Although Kazuma Asogi was originally going to act as the defense attorney for the case against prosecutor Taketsuchi Auchi, Yujin Mikotoba convinced Naruhodo to defend himself instead. Ultimately, Wilson's actual killer was revealed to be Jezaille Brett, and Jigoku subsequently acquitted Naruhodo. However, Britain called for the right of consular jurisdiction and instructed Jigoku to send her to Shanghai, China, as it was the closest place with a British consular court. After the conclusion of Naruhodo's trial, Jigoku also served as the judge for Iyesa Nosa's trial, who was revealed during Naruhodo's trial to be guilty of both theft from the restaurant Le Carneval and the attempted theft of a koban coin from Kyurio Korekuta.

Sometime before this trial and before Kazuma departed from Japan for his study abroad in Great Britain, Jigoku had selected Kazuma to fulfill Jigoku's end of his and Stronghart's assassin exchange, instructing Kazuma to seek out Tobias Gregson and assassinate him. Unfortunately for him, someone knocked Kazuma unconscious during the ship voyage and Kazuma was pronounced dead. Because Naruhodo became the legal exchange student in Kazuma's stead, Jigoku was unable to send another assassin as a replacement.

Trial of Rei Membami[]

Main article: The Adventure of the Blossoming Attorney

Nine months after the trial of Ryunosuke Naruhodo, Seishiro Jigoku presided over another trial, one which had significant ties to Naruhodo's: the murder of Jezaille Brett, John Wilson's killer. Brett had been murdered a week after her extradition arrangements were finalized, and university student Rei Membami was accused of the crime. Auchi acted as the prosecutor for this trial, and Membami's defense attorney was her friend Susato Mikotoba, a judicial assistant disguised as "Ryutaro Naruhodo" (the alleged cousin of Ryunosuke Naruhodo). Unbeknownst to Susato, Jigoku had already been informed by Yujin Mikotoba (his friend and Susato's father) that Susato was masquerading as a man to represent Membami. Throughout the trial, Jigoku supported Susato's charade and pretended to not notice anything. The actual killer of Jezaille Brett was eventually revealed to be journalist Raiten Menimemo, and Membami was subsequently acquitted. After the conclusion of the trial, Jigoku throttled Menimemo before the journalist could reveal any sensitive information about the fate of Kazuma Asogi to Susato. Jigoku then cheerfully revealed to Susato that he'd known who she was all along, before leaving with her father to discuss "diplomatic issues".

A fatal confrontation[]

Main articles: Twisted Karma and His Last Bow & The Resolve of Ryunosuke Naruhodo

About two months later, Seishiro Jigoku finally came up with a way to kill Tobias Gregson himself. He contacted Mael Stronghart to give Gregson a fake mission to kill Jigoku himself under the pretense that it was in line with the "Reaper's curse": after all, Jigoku was acquitted in his trial ten years ago, which had indeed been presided over by Barok van Zieks. The supposed assassination of Jigoku would take place on the last day of October aboard the SS Grouse as it headed for France, while Jigoku was aboard heading to the international scientific investigation symposium representing Japan. Kazuma Asogi was sent with Gregson as Jigoku's purported assassin, but ultimately did not carry out the deed, leaving Gregson no choice but to attempt the murder himself.

When Jigoku returned to his room at 9 PM, he found Gregson there with his gun. He performed an ippon seoi nage on Gregson, which choked and knocked him unconscious. As first-class cabins are surrounded by guards, he decided to wait until the emergency drill later that evening to do the final deed via strangling. Unfortunately, just as that time arrived, Gregson woke up and started attacking Jigoku in a frenzy. In a moment of panic, Jigoku drew the gun the English government had given him in the exchange program sixteen years ago, and shot Gregson, killing him.

Group photo

Group photograph of Seishiro, Mikotoba, Ryunosuke, and Susato. Not pictured is Gregson, whose corpse is inside Jigoku's trunk.

His assassination mission now complete, Jigoku hid Gregson's body in the refrigeration room in an attempt to obscure Gregson's time of death and thus his own involvement in it. He then put the corpse in his own suitcase and waited to take him off the boat, as there was no chance to throw the body overboard due to the large number of guards. Jigoku later joined Yujin at the Great Waterloo Hotel, where they were greeted by Susato and Naruhodo. After discussing the Professor killings and the conviction of Genshin Asogi, Jigoku and Yujin both discovered, much to their shock, that Kazuma Asogi was alive. Afterward, Susato had a bellboy take a commemorative group photo of the four of them, unaware of the significant part it would play in the trial to come.

Jigoku had heard from Stronghart about Gregson's secret apartment on Fresno Street (where he would secretly met with "Hugh Boone"), and headed there to drop off the body. He put on Gregson's red wig (used during his investigation of the Red-Headed League) as a disguise and bought some firecrackers from "Venus", which he used with the candles in the room as a makeshift timer that would go off like a gunshot, causing anyone nearby to assume that Gregson had only just been killed. This way, when "Boone" came to visit, he would be framed for Gregson's murder. However, Klint's younger brother, Barok van Zieks, showed up as part of his investigation of Gregson regarding his involvement in the Reaper conspiracy, and ended up taking the fall instead. While performing Gregson's autopsy, Maria Gorey noticed that although the body seemed reasonably fresh, the fish and chips in his coat pocket were moldy, suggesting that someone had tampered with the time of death; this was Jigoku's mistake, as he had forgotten to check Gregson's coat when placing his corpse in the refrigeration room, and thus the fish and chips had been left out to spoil.

Jigoku confess

Confessing to the murder of Inspector Gregson.

It was only in the subsequent trial that Seishiro Jigoku was finally brought to justice for his crimes. He tried to escape on the Grouse by hiding in his trunk and bribing Tchikin Strogenov to let no one inside his cabin, but was eventually found by Yujin Mikotoba and Herlock Sholmes nonetheless. During the trial, he denied everything, attempting to place the blame on Kazuma due to his status as Gregson's originally-intended assassin -- but after failing to do so and being proven the culprit, Jigoku smashed the witness stand, just as he had a decade prior, and said this was the end of him. He confessed to the murder, but also asserted that he was forced into both it and cooperation with the assassin exchange in general by his foreign counterpart, whose name he would not say. Stronghart, being the current judge, declared Jigoku guilty for Gregson's murder, and stated he would probably be executed after a later trial.

Personality[]

Japanjudge

Mugshot.

While Jigoku was very serious when presiding over the courtroom as a judge, he was a much more jovial man outside the courtroom, with a boisterous laugh and a keen, if somewhat dark, sense of humor. He loved taking out his gavel and shouting "GUILTY!" in a way he found quite amusing, though Naruhodo disagreed. Jigoku was also quite skilled at martial arts, especially the ippon seoi throw, and was strong enough to knock Gregson out with a chokehold and smash not one, but two separate witness stands with his bare hands. According to Yujin Mikotoba, Jigoku was partial to all things large.

Jigoku had a tendency to be absent-minded, such as when he put on Tobias Gregson's red wig in an attempt to disguise himself on Fresno Street. He often let his outside relationships weaken his authority in the courtroom, allowing Kazuma Asogi to make several disrespectful remarks about the Japanese government without penalty, Ryunosuke Naruhodo to stand as his own defense at the last minute, and Susato Mikotoba to defend Rei Membami despite being a woman. He often boasted about his own credentials, such as his role as Minister of Foreign Affairs, but was heavily influenced by the whims of people in power -- Stronghart in particular, who successfully coerced him into shooting his old friend and subsequently blackmailed into cooperating with his assassination exchange.

Jigoku was also a rather brash individual, willing to directly approach Kazuma in public with his plans to send him on an assassination mission, and also tended to let his emotions get the better of him, such as when he first broke the witness stand in his attempt to defend Genshin Asogi in the Professor trial. When he was summoned as a witness and became the target of Naruhodo's criminal accusations, Jigoku became angrier than before and behaved quite cruelly towards Naruhodo, spitefully calling him a "young student murderer" despite knowing he was innocent of the murder of John Wilson, and declaring that he should have convicted him just to spare the trial of the "nonsense" he was spouting.

Name[]

  • Japanese - Seishiro Jigoku (慈獄 政士郎):
    • "Seishiro" is comprised of the kanji for government (政) and samurai (士), most likely referencing his professions under the Japanese government.
    • "Jigoku", his Japanese surname, uses the kanjis for "mercy" (慈) and "prison" (獄), perhaps alluding to his profession as a judge; when written as "地獄", Jigoku means "hell".

Development[]

  • His appearance is based on Enma Dai-O, ruler of the underworld in Buddhist doctrine, who passes judgment on all the dead. Ironically, a different judge has been called Enma Dai-O before.

Note[]

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