Sirhan Dogen

Sirhan Dogen

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This article contains information from the unofficial English translation patch for Gyakuten Kenji 2.

Owing to the lack of an official translation of the Japan-only Gyakuten Kenji 2, the information and names in this article come from the unofficial English translation patch known as Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth: Prosecutor's Path. More information on this can be found here. If you have personal experience with the item of media in question, you can help the Ace Attorney Wiki by improving on this article. Please heed the manual of style when adding information.

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	One or more images used in this article do not meet the standards of the Ace Attorney Wiki. The editor who added this tag has given the following reason for image improvement: Poor quality portrait image; should be replaced with either a better artbook scan or a sprite/mugshot from the HD version of GK2.

Sirhan Dogen V · T · F
Occupation	Professional assassin Convict
Biological information
Last known status	Incarcerated (April 2019)
Eye color	White
Hair color	Unknown (bald)
Height (the metric (cm) values are sourced from official guidebooks and may not reflect the relative sizes of characters as depicted in-game or in other official media)	5'4"; 165 cm
Associates
Family	None mentioned
Friends	Anubis (pet dog) Simon Keyes (acolyte)
Affiliates	Di-Jun Huang (target; deceased) Di-Jun Huang's body double (former client & attempted murderer; deceased) Patricia Roland (former client, attempted murderer, & former prison director; arrested) Blaise Debeste (former client & attempted murderer; arrested) Miles Edgeworth (convicting prosecutor) Horace Knightley (real correspondence chess player; deceased) Shelly de Killer (rival assassin)
Aliases/nicknames
B-055* (prisoner number) The Supplier* (by other prison inmates)
Names in other languages
Japanese (romanization written with the given name first)	鳳院坊 了賢　(Ryouken Houinbou)
Miscellaneous
Debut episode	The Imprisoned Turnabout
Musical theme	"Sirhan Dogen ~ The Tone of an Assassination"

Sirhan Dogen

His is the first life I have ever saved... I will not allow it to be taken away so easily.

— The Grand Turnabout

Sirhan Dogen is a blind assassin with a large pet dog called Anubis. The ringing of the custom-made bells attached to his knife and Anubis are said to be the last things his victims hear. He was eventually caught and imprisoned at some point before March 2019.

Dogen the savior

Anubis saving the boys.

While walking with Anubis on a particularly cold day on Dec. 24, 2000, Dogen came across two boys trapped inside a frozen car, freezing to death. He saved them and took them to the Happy Family Home orphanage. Both boys lost their memories due to the trauma of their near-death experience, and no families seemed to be looking for them, so they remained in the orphanage. The irony of an assassin saving lives was not lost on Dogen, but this would only be the beginning of his interactions with the boys.

A presidential assassination

Main article: SS-5 Incident

Di-Jun Huang's final moments.

Six years later, Dogen was hired to assassinate Di-Jun Huang, the president of Zheng Fa, by one of his body doubles. The body double brought Chief Prosecutor Blaise Debeste to his cause, who in turn bribed Patricia Roland, the owner of the Happy Family Home orphanage, into cooperating. Dogen waited at the entrance of the orphanage for the president to arrive, then introduced himself and his intentions to his target. To the assassin's surprise, Huang begged not for his life, but for the opportunity to fulfill a planned meeting with his secret son, John Marsh. Dogen denied this request and attacked the president. The first strike sliced off a horn from a Moozilla doll with a built-in recording device, while the next strike dealt the fatal blow to Huang.

Dogen then waited inside the orphanage so that his employers could clean up the crime scene. However, Simon Keyes, one of the boys he had rescued from the car years prior, warned him that the three co-conspirators were planning to kill him. The boy set a fire to distract the assassin's former employers so that Dogen could escape. Dogen began to grow fond of the boy, and the two kept in touch through correspondence chess. The president's murder was made to look like a kidnapping (with the body double assuming the real Huang's identity), and it was known within police files as the SS-5 Incident.

In prison

Main article: The Imprisoned Turnabout

Intimidating Roland.

Dogen was eventually caught and convicted of his crimes, with Miles Edgeworth being the prosecutor in his trial. Knowing that Roland had become the warden of the prison in which he would reside, he threatened her and her family, claiming that he still had many henchmen outside working for him. He also told her that he knew about John Marsh; knowledge that could be used to expose the body double as a fake. This made Roland so deathly afraid of the assassin that she would capitulate to whatever he demanded. Among other things, Dogen used this advantage over Roland to procure various items for other prisoners, giving him the nickname of "the Supplier". Roland would use Anubis to deliver the goods from a well in the prison courtyard to Dogen's cell. During his stay in prison, Dogen took up chiseling and continued to play chess with Keyes through mail correspondence.

Roland's interrogations of Dogen proved fruitless.

On March 25, 2019, Horace Knightley was arrested and brought to the prison. Two days later, Anubis brought Knightley's dead body to Dogen. Near the neck of the corpse, the assassin heard the sound of the bell that had been attached to his knife. However, he found that the apparent murder weapon was not his knife, but a small chisel similar to the ones that he had acquired. Realizing that he was being set up to be implicated in the crime, he had Anubis drop the body off in Workroom A, pull out the weapon there, and bring it back to him. Dogen followed the ensuing investigation and ended up meeting Miles Edgeworth again.

Although the prison was searched, Dogen was able to hide the murder weapon by having Anubis keep it inside his mouth whenever he had visitors. Nonetheless, he found himself being suspected of the crime by Edgeworth, who eventually found the chisel. Dogen was also surprised to find that Edgeworth believed that Knightley was his chess opponent. Fortunately for him, fingerprint testing on the chisel revealed only Knightley's prints. Edgeworth eventually exposed Roland as the real killer the following day, and found the murder weapon, Dogen's knife, hidden inside her pet alligator.

Escape

Main article: The Grand Turnabout

Five days after Roland's arrest, Dogen escaped from the prison to find Keyes. Three days later, the body double was murdered, and the assassin found Miles Edgeworth at the crime scene conversing with Shi-Long Lang about the SS-5 Incident. It soon became apparent that they had figured out the truth behind the "kidnapping", prompting Dogen to reveal himself and offer information about his acolyte. Dogen learned that Keyes had merely pretended to play chess with him, and that he had really acted as a middle-man, pretending to play against both Dogen and Knightley and having them unwittingly play against each other. After learning where Keyes was, the assassin made his exit.

De Killer vs. Dogen.

Edgeworth confronted Keyes and successfully showed that he was the mastermind who had killed the body double and instigated Roland into killing Knightley by making it look like he was one of Dogen's henchmen (hence why he had gone to lengths to made it seem as if Dogen and Knightley were knowingly playing chess with one another). The assassin Shelly de Killer suddenly appeared in order to kill Keyes, as the latter had betrayed his personal code of client-assassin trust. However, Dogen crossed blades with the fellow professional killer and asked him to spare Keyes' life. De Killer scoffed at the idea that Dogen would beg for someone else's life, but agreed to spare Keyes and left.

John Marsh, who had been present during Edgeworth's confrontation of Keyes, then called out Dogen. Identifying the anger in the young boy, Dogen offered Marsh a knife and gave him the opportunity to exact his revenge. However, Marsh put aside his feelings and refused to kill the assassin, leaving Dogen to eventually return to prison with his acolyte.

Personality

Mugshot.

Dogen is a patient, cryptic, unflappable man with a dark sense of humor. He mostly makes up for his blindness with his hearing and his long memory. He remembers everyone he has killed, as well as tiny details like the mention of horn props on John Marsh's head. He is also very perceptive of the personalities of others, recognizing why Di-Jun Huang's body double could never really live up to the legacy of the real deal.

Dogen's life changed after his encounters with Simon Keyes. By becoming something akin to a father figure, he ceased to be merely a ruthless assassin, and was willing to go to great lengths to protect Keyes. He eventually grew tired of killing and took up chess and wood carving in prison. He then grew weary even of those activities and seemed to have no issue with allowing Marsh to avenge his father's death. This opportunity to die was denied, but Dogen gained Keyes as a new prison companion.

Dogen and fellow assassin Shelly de Killer appear to have encountered each other at some point in the past, as Dogen comments that "It has been far too long" during their standoff.

Name

• His Japanese surname "Hōinbō" may be derived from Hon'inbō, one of the four major schools of Go in Japan.
• His Japanese given name "Ryōken" is a homophone for the Japanese word for "hunting dog".
• His name in the unofficial English fan translation patch for Gyakuten Kenji 2 is "Sirhan Dogen"; "Sirhan" is an African name that means "wolf" (as well as being the name of the assassin who killed United States Senator Robert F. Kennedy), while "Dogen" is both a play on "dog" and the name of a Japanese Zen Buddhist teacher.

Development

• His prison number is "B-055", which looks similar to the English word "boss". This is likely a reference to his status as the "Supplier" for the prison's inmates.
• Like a few other characters in Gyakuten Kenji 2, Dogen has design and personality parallels with a chess piece. With his prayer beads, Buddhist-like leitmotif, "fallen priest" nickname, and even the shape of his head, Dogen represents the bishop.
• Dogen uses "sessou" (拙僧) in his style of speech, which is a very humble first-person personal pronoun that gives him the feel of a Buddhist monk.