Yasunobu Endo

Yasunobu Endo was a local gang’s second-in-command whose disappearance became the starting point for the investigation of the Saitama Dog Lover Serial Disappearances. The contrast between his organized-crime rank and the ordinary acts by which Konan residents remembered him—most notably his rides to the hospital—makes him more than a missing name in a case file. His last known movements offered investigators a chronology; the later account that Gen Sekine poisoned him and that Shima helped bury him supplied the fate that the search had not yet established.

Identity and Background

Until he vanished, Endo was the number two man in the Takada-gumi, a third-tier group within the Inagawa crime family. The gang was led by Takada. Endo had not always been a gangster: a local firefighter told the reporter that he used to drive a truck. The shift from truck driver to senior gang member gives his biography a concrete measure of change, although the evidence does not explain how or why he entered organized crime.

Endo had also stood as a candidate in the 1984 mayoral election. He received only 120 votes and lost by a wide margin. The photograph he submitted showed a tough-looking man with calm eyes, a punch perm, and a nose that appeared to have been broken more than once. The image initially encouraged the reporter to think of Endo chiefly in terms of the danger attached to his position. Yet the election and the town’s memories of him complicate that first impression: he had sought public office, however unsuccessfully, and was known personally to people outside the gang.

Life in Konan

When the reporter went to Konan to ask about Endo, the town appeared small and rural, with a large Zexel factory, a golf course, schools, a town hall, a grocery store, and open fields. The reporter began inquiries at the fire department because he expected firefighters to be more forthcoming than police. What he heard did not match an expectation that residents would speak of a gang leader only with fear or awe. People spoke well of Endo and seemed worried about what had happened to him.

One firefighter recalled voting for Endo in the 1984 mayoral election and described him as a good man. Another resident’s recollection gave that local regard a practical detail: Endo, or sometimes his driver, Wakui, had given the man rides to the hospital for heart medicine. The resident marked Endo’s failure to arrive on July 22 of the previous year on a calendar, because the promised ride had not come and the medicine mattered. The date was not remembered through a public record or a gang dispute, but through an everyday obligation that Endo had failed to keep. It became a precise clue to the last time this witness knew he had not seen Endo alive.

Disappearance and Investigation

Yamamoto assigned the reporter to investigate Endo and Wakui, both of whom were missing. The assignment called for a fuller account of Endo: how he knew Gen Sekine, when he had last been seen alive, what kind of person he was, and why he might have been killed. Yamamoto told the reporter that Endo’s life would be the subject of his work from then on. The instruction made Endo both a victim to be reconstructed and the human center of a developing criminal investigation.

Sekiguchi traced Endo’s final night up to his disappearance. At 9 P.M., after illegal gambling, Endo called Yumi-chan and said he would be late. The brevity of the call leaves its personal circumstances largely unknown, but its timing gave investigators a point on the timeline. It sits beside, rather than resolves, the other reported markers: the missed hospital ride on July 22 and the disappearance of Endo and Wakui. The evidence establishes fragments of Endo’s final period, not a complete account of where he went or what happened between those moments.

Death and Narrative Significance

The investigation eventually changed direction when Arai revealed that Shima, his driver, had participated in burying Endo and Wakui. Arai had learned that Gen Sekine had killed both men with poison. This account distinguished Endo’s fate from the unresolved question of how or where he had been taken out: the evidence supplied a killer and a method, while Shima’s knowledge of the burial could help investigators locate the bodies. The information also made Shima, rather than Arai, central to establishing what had happened to the missing men.

Endo’s importance in the narrative rests partly on this gradual recovery of a person from scattered accounts. His gang rank gives the disappearance criminal stakes; the failed mayoral campaign and hospital rides give it a local, personal scale. The reporter first encounters a formidable-looking figure through a photograph, then hears residents describe someone they had known and worried about. The investigation’s chronology, meanwhile, advances through small records and recollections—a calendar date, a promised ride, a late-night call—before Arai’s disclosure identifies Endo as a victim of Gen Sekine. His life remains only partially documented, but the contrast between public menace and remembered neighborliness is central to how the case makes his absence matter.