Dogs

Dogs occupy an uneasy position in the account of Gen Sekine: they are bred and sold as exotic pets, used to establish his standing among yakuza groups, and made into instruments of intimidation. They are not presented as independent actors so much as animals caught in a human economy of money, status, and threat. Yet the recurring presence of dogs makes the costs of that economy visible, especially when Sekine’s claim to admire animals is set against the ways he uses them.

Dogs and Sekine’s business

Sekine had been around local yakuza circles from a young age, running errands without becoming a full-fledged member. His life took a new direction in 1972, when he began dealing in exotic pets. The business prospered, and in 1983 he married another animal lover and settled in Kumagaya, in northern Saitama Prefecture. Dogs were central to his trade, which also included wild animals sold to criminal groups seeking to project toughness.

The work extended beyond selling animals. To reduce expenses, Sekine made pet food himself, slaughtering pigs and cattle and grinding their offal into feed for dogs. Neighbors objected to the animal remains discarded with ordinary trash and to the disturbance around the shop. Sekine eventually cleaned up his operation, and the neighbors adapted to living near it. The detail places dogs within a practical business system: their food, care, and sale all depended on a local enterprise that also imposed costs on the surrounding community.

The animals were not simply household pets in this trade. According to an account of Sekine’s connections, he supplied vicious dogs and wild beasts to yakuza customers, who valued them as extensions of a threatening public image. A lion sold to one group remained alive, but Sekine’s relationship to animals was described as instrumental: he admired them in a qualified sense and used them. Dogs therefore belonged both to the ordinary routines of breeding and feeding and to a criminal culture that turned possession of dangerous animals into a performance of power.

Dogs as leverage and intimidation

A dispute over the price of a dog illustrates how that power operated at close range. Sekine’s customer was negotiating over a purebred dog priced at one and a half million yen and asked for a reduction of half a million. Sekine responded by using the animal itself in a violent demonstration, then treated the act as if it settled the price. The customer paid and took the dog. The episode makes the transaction more than a disagreement over money: the dog became the medium through which Sekine communicated what resistance might cost, without needing to make a direct threat against the buyer.

The account also reports that a former worker had once seen Sekine kill a dog with an injection. That recollection was offered amid speculation about how Sekine might have killed Yasunobu Endo, a yakuza. The former worker proposed a poison injection as a possible method, drawing on what he said he had witnessed, but the passage does not establish that this was how Endo died. The distinction matters: the alleged killing of the dog is presented as testimony, while the proposed connection to Endo remains conjecture. Dogs enter the investigation not as proof of a crime but as part of the witness’s account of Sekine’s capacity for violence.

The kennel and criminal networks

Sekine’s dog business also helped connect him to criminal organizations. Before moving to Konan, he had fallen into serious trouble with the Yamaguchi-gumi over money and had previously belonged to the Kyokuto-kai. After arriving in the area, a customer introduced him to the Takada-gumi, whose boss received an expensive dog as a gesture of gratitude. The account traces Sekine’s subsequent links to the Inagawa-kai and his role as a supplier of dogs and other animals to yakuza customers.

Those relationships give the animals a place in the broader investigation into disappearances associated with Sekine. When Akio Kawasaki, a waste-management company president, failed to return home, his wife’s mention of a disagreement between him and a dog breeder changed the police response. An officer warned her to prepare for the worst if her husband had been involved with Sekine. This does not show that a dog caused Kawasaki’s disappearance, or that dogs were used in it. Rather, the breeder’s identity and business had become a recognizable route into a history of suspected violence and criminal association.

The earlier investigation into missing people linked to Sekine had lost momentum, and its first cases had largely been forgotten. Kawasaki’s disappearance brought renewed attention to the breeder and to the network surrounding him. In that context, dogs function as a recurring point of contact between everyday commerce and the police inquiry: a dispute over a dog could draw attention to Sekine, while his trade connected him to customers and groups whose relationships mattered to investigators.

Meaning and narrative role

The contrast between animal admiration and animal use is central to the portrait. Sekine was said to admire animals for acting on instinct and without conscience, and to want to be like them. The account does not present that identification as a bond that protects animals. Instead, his business and the reported episodes of cruelty show admiration coexisting with control: dogs are fed, bred, sold, and used to unsettle buyers, while their treatment is determined by the human purposes around them.

Dogs consequently carry several meanings at once. They are living animals, valuable merchandise, signs of yakuza status, and—in the account of the price negotiation—objects through which intimidation is made tangible. Their presence helps explain how Sekine’s pet trade could reach beyond the kennel into criminal relationships, but it does not make them responsible for the violence associated with those networks. The narrative’s emphasis remains on the people who buy, sell, and exploit them, and on the way an apparently ordinary dog business could lead investigators toward a much darker history.