Characters / Like a Dragon: Goro Majima

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Character-Specific Pages: Kazuma Kiryu | Goro Majima | Akira Nishikiyama | Ichiban Kasuga
Yakuza | Yakuza 2 | Yakuza 3 | Yakuza 4 | Yakuza 5 | Like a Dragon: Ishin! | Yakuza 0 (Dojima Lieutenants | Kamurocho Residents | Sotenbori Residents) | Yakuza 6 | Yakuza: Like a Dragon (The Heroes of Tomorrow) | Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name | Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth
Judgment (Takayuki Yagami) | Lost Judgment

Goro Majima

Voiced by: Hidenari Ugaki (Japanese), Mark Hamill (English; 1), Matthew Mercer (English; Like A Dragon Onwards)^{Other Languages}Liu Yao (Chinese)

Portrayed by: Goro Kishitani (Yakuza Live-Action Film), Shunsuke Kubozuka (Yakuza Stage Play)

Majima as he appears in Yakuza: Like a Dragon.

^{Click here to see Majima as he appears in Yakuza 0.}

"Ya know what I'm about by now. The stronger they come, the more I'm gonna like 'em."

The patriarch of the Majima family, formerly the "Mad Dog of the Shimano Family" and all round crazy dude. Known to be completely unpredictable and untamed, he is none the less highly respected for his skill and deceptive intelligence. Once the captain of the Shimano family until the man's demise, the Majima Family are as loose in their allegiances as their unpredictable Patriarch. In the second game Majima turns them into a (mostly) legitimate construction company, though they are no less dangerous because of it, and is talked into returning back to the Tojo Clan in the third game.

Majima is always eager to seek a challenge and only respects strength. In the first game, he's a constant hindrance in Kiryu's quest, only interested in fighting him as a rival and couldn't care less about the missing ten billion yen. He becomes something of an ally onward, shown to be immensely loyal toward those who win his respect, which is only earned by besting him in a fight. With the exception of games where he's playable, he's fought in almost every game as a boss. By the fourth game, he's toned down quite a bit, and it's shown that he was extremely tight with his sworn brother, Taiga Saejima.

Majima was Promoted to Playable in the non-canon Yakuza: Dead Souls. He is also the deuteragonist and second playable character in the prequel Yakuza 0. After being excommunicated from the Tojo Clan after the failed Ueno Seiwa hit, Majima is given another chance to make a name for himself in the Japanese underworld. He also get his own short playable campaign in the Yakuza 2 remake, Yakuza Kiwami 2.

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A-I

• The Ace: As Kiryu's rival, he can go up against him with more than just fighting.
  • He is one of the extremely few people who can contend with Kiryu, though not enough to beat him; Kiwami illustrates this by throwing you into a Hopeless Boss Fight with him right after you get out of prison. ^note You CAN win, but you'll have your work cut out for you, since Majima uses moves here that you won't see again until reaching max rank in Majima Everywhere.
  • Yakuza 0 and 2 onwards prove that he is a natural businessman and leader, whether the enterprise in question is illicit or legitimate. That being said, his methods of handling his employees tend to vary a little bit depending on the legality.
  • Like Kiryu, Majima can participate in various side activites, and does well at all of them. This extends into Kiwami, where he is an opponent in several minigames; he's generally one of the toughest challengers you can face in any of them, including MesuKing and Pocket Circuit.
• Adaptational Badass: He's always been a force to be reckoned with, but Kiwami borrows heavily from his depiction in the prequel 0, especially gameplay-wise. The end result diverges from his original portrayal in the original game to a noticeable degree.
  • He now has access to all of his fighting styles from 0 which you can experience in full by engaging with the new "Majima Everywhere" system.
  • The mandatory battles against him in the storyline are definitely hit with this. Your first night out of jail and on the streets of Kamurocho will pit you against him in a new Hopeless Boss Fight where even winning will have Kiryu remark on how hard it was to fight him. Regardless, Majima will be no worse for wear after the fight before lecturing Kiryu on how weak he's become having avoided fighting while imprisoned for 10 long years.
  • During the first long battle sequence in the middle of Sera's funeral, he'll suddenly pop up near the end in a suit and tie and attack Kiryu using his unarmed "Thug Style", returning to the more refined, controlled, and precise fighting skills he relied on more in his "Lord of the Night" days. Said style makes a reappearance during the 2nd phase of the last story fight against Majima in Shangri-La where he's especially quick and aggressive.
  • During the first boss fight against him from the original game in the batting cages, he'll now suddenly swap to his "Slugger Style", mixing his unmatched agility and dexterity with all the brutality of an aluminum bat.
  • While there's no specific instance of a fight against his "Breaker Style" during the course of the main story, it does reappear when engaging with the "Majima Everywhere" system. It's just as brutally tricky to fight against as it was immensely simple to spam against enemies in 0.
  • The optional "Final" Showdown with him as part of the "Majima Everywhere" system grants him stats on par with the Final Boss fights of the series, showing just how strong he really is when he's fighting seriously. Naturally, he uses his famous "Mad Dog Style" that is based on his wild, lightning-fast knife-fighting skills that he utilizes across the series.
  • Also present in Kiwami 2. Try to get a rematch against him in the Coliseum and notice how he now has a very large white health-bar comparable to that of the Final Boss and Super Bosses.
• Adaptational Heroism: Compare his characterisation in the original to that of Kiwami. His depiction in all the new content in Kiwami is more in line with his characterisation in later games, in contrast to the Ax-Crazy thug he was in 1.
  • Double subverted in one instance. Though Kiwami does have an extra scene where he tries to provoke Kiryu into fighting him by beating his head bloody with an umbrella and then threatening him with a knife when that fails, Kiryu's clearly uninjured by the experience. So in a temporary moment of seriousness, Majima then takes the time to try and relate to him how cruel and meaningless their world of Yakuza is before accepting the fact that Kiryu won't fight him unless he has a good reason to. He cheerfully departs scheming up new ways to give Kiryu "a reason" to fight.
• Affectionate Gesture to the Head: Strokes a terrified Makoto's hair after he helps her escape from becoming a Yakuza hit in Yakuza 0.
• Affectionate Nickname: He tends to refer to Kiryu as "Kiryu-chan", or "Kazzy"/"Kazuma-chan" in the English translations pre-0.
• Agent Peacock: His often loud, excitable, flamboyant demeanor and penchant for flashy acrobatic spectacle lends itself to this sort of image, especially in several Majima Everywhere events in Kiwami, but he's still one of the Tojo Clan's greatest and a worthy match-up against the likes of the Legendary Dragon of Dojima.
• Ambiguously Bi: Definitely into women, but the lengths he goes to in pursuing Kiryu sometimes borders on Stalker with a Crush with the sexual subtext of it, plus he has a little too much fun with the idea of getting a kiss or more from Daigo in Dead Souls. This is to say nothing of his steadfast devotion and fondness for Saejima, which other yakuza describe as surprising and somewhat excessive even between sworn brothers, and which tends to bring out his more mellow side. There's also his iconic "KIRYU-CHAN!" While "-chan" is often reserved for people referring to their romantic partners in the same vein as "baby" or "honey", it can also be used by men as a way to belittle someone they're intimidating, like with yakuza picking a fight.
• Ambiguous Situation: In the original release of Yakuza, Majima gets knocked out after his boss fight at Shangri-la and doesn't make another appearance for the rest of the game, leaving his survival ambiguous until the sequels. Kiwami averts this, as not only will the "Majima Everywhere" mechanic continue even after this boss fight, but he'll also send a text to Kiryu once Shimano's been dealt with.
• Animal Motifs:
  • In an extension of his Oni motif, Majima is also associated with snakes, as can be seen in the snake motif of his eyepatch and jacket as well as a number of his moves in 0 referencing snakes.
  • Majima is also often referred to as the "Mad Dog of Shimano". His story in 0 particularly emphasizes the fact that he feels he's being held on a leash.
• Anti-Hero: Mostly evident in his playable appearances, particularly 0 and Dead Souls. You can count on Majima to do what's right and save the day, but unlike Kiryu and some of the others, his methods aren't always pure nor are his intentions always heroic. He's still very much a violent misfit through and through.
• Ascended Extra: In the original game, he was a Recurring Boss that was more concerned with fighting Kiryu than getting involved with the whole missing ten billion yen thing. In Yakuza Kiwami, a remake of the first game, his role is expanded significantly with the new "Majima Everywhere" mechanic, where he can be fought at any given time in order to bring Kiryu back up to speed. Not only is he now the first person Kiryu meets in Kamurocho after he leaves prison, but Majima beats him in a Curb-Stomp Battle. Same goes for Kiwami 2 where he receives his own campaign.
• Asskicking Leads to Leadership: Captain of the Shimano Family and Patriarch of the subsidiary Majima Family in the first game. After they leave the Tojo Clan in 2, Majima turns them into legitimate a construction company. However, Kiryu later talks Majima into into rejoining the Tojo Clan 3 for the sake of supporting Daigo. By 4, Majima has managed to turn his rag-tag collection of thugs into one of the largest families in the Tojo Clan, which was ironically helped by the remnants of the three other families (Dojima Family, Shimano Family and Nishikiyama Family) joining the Mad Dog.
• Aura Vision: In 0, the Thug Style upgrade "Thug Mastery (Insight)" lets you press both triggers on the controller mid-combat in order to have Majima crouch down and put his hand on the ground somehow allowing him to detect whether any of the generic mooks around him have concealed weapons. If they're carrying knives, they'll glow yellow and if they're carrying guns, they'll glow red. While this can be helpful as a heads up for which enemies you'll want to make sure get taken out before they reach low health and have a chance to take out their weapons, being able to see who's hiding a knife can be useful for the Thug style upgrade "Essence of the Thug: Blade Steal" which lets Majima steal a knife from an enemy secretly carrying one while also dealing massive damage to them.
• Awesomeness by Analysis: In 0, Majima does some undercover work at a rival hostess club, the Odyssey, in order to poach their top-earning hostess. When the manager of Odyssey confronts him, having seen through his Paper-Thin Disguise, Majima responds by listing the reasons why the club isn't performing as well as Majima's own club, using information he's gleamed through observing the club around him and subtly questioning one of their hostesses. He then uses this same information to make a deal that benefits both himself and his rival manager.
• Ax-Crazy: A rare example of a protagonist qualifying for this trope. Particularly in the first game, where he's introduced as a violent and unhinged maniac who's only interested in fighting Kiryu. He's on your side from the second game onward, but he's just as crazy, eager to bust some heads and never flinches against danger. It gets toned down from the fourth game onward, including the prequel.
• Badass in Distress: A variant of sorts in Yakuza 5, where he's brought out to Saejima all beaten and chained up, and is forced to fight his blood brother to the death. Downplayed as Majima was earlier shown to have Kurosawa cornered in a room with all of his men lying in a bloody heap. Turns out the only reason he ended up captured and beaten anyway was because Kurosawa was holding Haruka hostage and Majima couldn't bring himself to put her life in any more danger.
• Badass in a Nice Suit: If he's not wearing his usual snakeskin jacket, he'll be wearing this. It's also his default outfit in Yakuza 0 as " Lord of the Night", when at work it looks classy but when he's going casual, he pops the collar dress shirt and drops the the bowtie for a chain
• Bad Boss: Zig-Zagged.
  • As a crime boss Majima treats his thugs like dirt, having no problem with beating them for arbitrary reasons, berating and/or threatening them or even sending them to a fight that he knows they'll lose. Despite it all he's still capable of inspiring great loyalty from them. This gets Played for Laughs in Kiwami 2 when he sets up Majima Construction, where he harasses Nishida after he points out they don't know anything about construction at all, and Majima even threatens to kill everyone under him in an attempt to motivate them. Of course, this only seems to apply when it comes to gangsters since... in 0, the staff at Grand and the customers regard him as one of the nicest men in the world and he will go out of his way to ensure that they are content and taken care of. Though there is one massage customer who calls him a slave-driver.
  • In general, these tendencies have decreased significantly past the first two games, remakes included, or at least they've stopped focusing on them. At most, he'll snark at his young lieutenant Minami for thinking he has a chance against Akiyama. There's a chance that he mostly became one due to the way his own boss Shimano was and then slowly eased up his cruelty towards his underlings after his death and Majima's own rise through the ranks of the Tojo Clan.
• Bash Brothers: He finally gets to fight alongside his sworn brother Saejima in Like a Dragon when squaring off against Ichiban and company.
• Batter Up!: Alongside his dagger, a baseball bat seems to be one of his more reoccurring weapons.
  • In the first Yakuza, while accosting Kiryu in a batting cage area, he carries a baseball bat which he uses on an unfortunate thug of his. He gets to properly use it against kiryu in Kiwami.
  • While he doesn't use one in Dead Souls, his proficiency with baseball bats becomes handy when Akiyama pitches him a grenade which Majima then sends flying to a boss zombie by using his shotgun as a baseball bat.
  • He finally gets a baseball bat as one of his proper weapons in 0, after learning the "Slugger" style from watching Fei Hu take on a belligerent customer with a wooden stick, he picks up a worn beat-up bat from the street and becomes his favored weapon for the style from then on.
  • Slugger Majima is also one of his "Majima Everywhere" boss modes in Kiwami, hilariously it's also the preferred weapon of Officer Majima (almost akin to a Lawman Baton just more lethal and less legal).
• Because You Were Nice to Me: A recurring theme in 0 is the fierce loyalty and gratitude Majima tends to inspire in his employees and hostesses due to his Benevolent Boss attitude and overall kindness. A few of the hostesses, such as Ai, are taken aback at how well he treats his employees due to being used to working with hateful assholes.
• Been There, Shaped History: His friendly advice to a government official he happens to meet by chance and rescue from a beating results in the bursting of Japan's asset price bubble and the subsequent Lost Decade. Naturally, this gets Played for Laughs. The man himself acknowledges it proudly (and hilariously) in one of the Majima Everywhere events in Kiwami.
• Beneath the Mask: On the surface, Goro Majima appears to be nothing more than an unhinged, bloodthirsty lunatic. Each game, however, adds more layers to his character and shows that there's more to him than meets the eye. Yakuza 0 finally reveals that his "Mad Dog" persona is just that — a persona he created at the end of that game's story which he maintains to this day. Underneath it all, he's actually a deep-thinking, morally conscious man who simply chose to live "crazier than the rest of 'em" in a conscious effort to make himself stronger (in his own way) and to cope with the harsh, unforgiving reality of the Yakuza lifestyle. Lampshaded after a Majima Everywhere event in Kiwami.
  Kiryu: (As usual, he shows you a glimpse of someone serious and then goes right back to his usual self.)
  • With 0 justifying his usual insanity as merely a persona he created to cope with the harsh and unreasonable life of a yakuza, it puts his more even-minded demeanor since reuniting with Saejima in a different perspective. With his oath brother and closest friend back, he feels even less obligated to keep up the act which would explain how much calmer and more heroic he is from 4 onwards. This of course ignores Dead Souls which is an admittedly extremely stressful situation in which Saejima is out of the country at the time so he could be justified for falling back on said coping mechanism.
• Berserk Button:
  • Don't let him catch you putting recyclables in the trash where it doesn't belong. It's implied that he got this trait from Shimano, who was rather upset about the damage done to the ozone layer back in the 80s.
  • The official music video for Majima no MajiROCK shows that the events of 0 have left harming innocent women in his presence as one.
• Beware the Silly Ones: Unpredictable and manic, but also one of the few people who can match Kiryu in strength and skill.
• Big Damn Heroes: Has his moments and does so in the most ridiculously awesome manner possible. For instance, in Yakuza 3, when Kiryu is surrounded by a ton of agents with no escape, Majima suddenly comes in driving a giant truck (a giant pink truck no less) to clear the way and save the day.
• Blade Enthusiast: His iconic tanto dagger and thanks to the first Yakuza game, which gets quite some focus.
• Blackout Basement: In the first game, the second phase of your second and final fight against him takes place in a dark room with the only light coming from the small hole above. The darkness makes it especially hard to see and prepare for his already rather tricky attacks. It's not as bad in the Kiwami remake since his constant Heat Aura in this phase means you should always see where he is but it can still be disorienting, especially since he's still very quick with his quicksteps essentially allowing him to teleport around Kiryu.
• Blood Knight:
  • He'll find ANY excuse to have a match with Kiryu. This also doesn't apply just to him; he's generally itching to fight with almost anyone and, in the case of everything in Dead Souls, anything. Taken to new heights in Kiwami, which elevates him into someone who stalks Kiryu, waiting to surprise and fight him.
  • Interestingly, as with a lot about Majima, in later games this is hinted to be a partial act. He takes his role as a yakuza extremely seriously and can't just give help to someone for free. But if they can beat him in a fight, he'll offer his help unhesitantly. It's frequently framed as he's using the fight to be able to help where he can while still playing within the rules.
  • That said, the sheer joy and elation that Majima has on his face during a number of his unique HEAT actions in 0 before he became known as a "Mad Dog" as well as the conversations he has with Nishitani and other characters suggests that there is in fact a legitimate thrill and enjoyment he gets out of fighting just for the sake of fighting.
  Nishitani: "We met with a reason to beat on each other. How you gonna improve on that?"
  Majima: "Shit, now you're starting to sound reasonable..."
• Breakout Character: Majima quickly became a fan favorite due to his crazy antics, enough for him to be Promoted to Playable in Dead Souls. He's also the deuteragonist of 0, and the remakes of the first two games expand his role significantly.
• Brutal Honesty: A major difference between Kiryu and Majima is how little Majima minces words when dealing with others. It's rather noticeable in 0 as he may put up a front of being the perfect Lord of the Night on the job, but once that ends he won't give a 2nd thought to things like politeness and proper manners when he can easily get the point across by being blunt.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: He might seem like a Psycho for Hire, but this guy runs a legitimate construction company, has won incredible loyalty from his employees and has become one of the most senior Yakuza Lieutenants. He's no uncontrolled fool, just a little... eccentric.
• Busman's Vocabulary: He may not be a professional baseball player like Shinada from 5 but he nonetheless displays an avid interest in the sport from time to time and it sometimes causes him to slip baseball metaphors into his dialogue from time to time, particularly in 0. At one point, he even tries to correct Nishitani on his use of baseball jargon when he feels that he's using it improperly.
• Car Fu: In the first game, he smashes a large truck into a building to get Kiryu to fight him. In the third game, he plows a giant pink truck through a crowd of agents to save Kiryu. Except he was so careless that he thought he almost ran over his favorite rival. He also repeats the act of smashing a truck into a building during the Majima no MajiROCK video, though this time he's doing it to get to the target of his wrath instead of Kiryu.
• Catchphrase:
  • Uses multiple variants of the phrase "Ain't that a kick in the dick!" as a response to various unpleasant revelations, particularly in 0.
  • There's also his iconic "Kiryu-chan!"
• The Champion: Although he shares the role with Kiryu at times, Majima serves as the predominant one in Yakuza 0 for Makoto.
• Character Development: Majima became less and less villainous as the series went on and even toned down his eccentric nature by the time of his reunion with Saejima. The prequel explains that Majima was never really a bad person, just that he decided to live his life to the fullest, taking example from some of the finest people he met.
• Characterization Marches On: Majima has always been eccentric to the point of insanity, but in the first game was played quite a bit differently than what we're used to from the character. His personality was more intimidating and unpredictable; he routinely abused his subordinates within an inch of their life if they were lucky, and despite his Worthy Opponent relationship with Kiryu he was still comfortably positioned in the role of antagonist. From the second game on he's more zany than psychotic, inspires immense loyalty from his men, and is always allied with the protagonists even when it wouldn't be advantageous to be so. In short, he went from this to this.
• Charles Atlas Superpower: Though he's often implied to be not quite as physically strong as Kiryu or Saejima he's still far stronger than you'd think even physically possible for a human being. At one point during his second boss fight in the original game, he'll punch the second floor the Shangri-La soapland with enough force to cave it in, causing a hole to form and drop him and Kiryu into a boiler room where the fight continues. Not to mention the fact that he can pull off some impressive feats of speed and skill that has allowed him to survive all kinds of ordeals. Good example of his speed is his fight with Kei Ibuchi, where he's fast enough to outright dodge several gunshots even when the barrel was basically aiming point blank at him.
• Chick Magnet: Thanks to 0, as before the list was only Mirei. However Makoto seems to have reciprocated his feelings despite never getting a chance to tell him, and there's all the hostess girls and even side missions. He can now even compete with Kiryu.
• Climax Boss: Out of all of Saejima's boss fights in Yakuza 4, he's the one he has the most personal relationship with, them being Sworn Brothers and Saejima's feelings over seemingly being abandoned by said sworn brother all those years ago. It also helps that he's the last boss he faces in his segment of the game before switching perspectives.
• Confusion Fu: In contrast to Kiryu, Majima's fighting style is wilder and more frantic. His boss fights usually consists of him him quick-dashing around before trying to to take a swing at you. Even in 0 long before his Madness Makeover, his default Thug fighting style relies on speed and deception to outmaneuver and outsmart enemies and hit them when they're most vulnerable compared to Kiryu's upfront approach with Brawler style.
• Combat Pragmatist: His Thug style revolves around underhanded techniques such as eye poking, elbow strikes, and getting behind them to deliver Choke Holds and Neck Snaps. His later Mad Dog style channels pragmatism in a different way, being more erratic and unpredictable to disorient enemies as well as relying primarily on a bladed weapon rather than the fisticuffs that most major characters at his level of fighting ability utilize.
• The Comically Serious: Like Kiryu, he inevitably comes across as this as the player character in 0 during many of the zanier substories and minigames. Downplayed in that he's not as much of a stoic hardass as Kiryu, and he apparently has his limits as he refuses to enter the Pocket Circuit Stadium while he's in Kamurocho. Averted in all other games, of course.
• Complexity Addiction: In Kiwami, while he's not above simply picking a fight with Kiryu on the streets, he'll also go into extreme and elaborate lengths just to create a scenario to fight him, including hiring a movie crew just to stage a faux-Zombie Apocalypse.
• Conspicuous Gloves: Black leather gloves. He only started wearing them frequently after his Madness Makeover in 0. Considering how he fights with a tanto knife that lacks any proper guard, they're actually very practical. Better to not ask how they disappear whenever he does the typical one-handed Battle Strip.
• Consummate Professional: For all of his weirdness, he's a very competent businessman who, as a cabaret manager, will go out of his way to guarantee his customers excellent service. As a yakuza captain, he's...rather different.
• Cool Old Guy: He's currently pushing 60 and still hasn't lost his edge (though he's a bit sensitive about his age).
• Cool Shades: His Paper-Thin Disguise is just him wearing a pair of aviators, while they're a pathetic way of hiding his identity, he definitely pulls them off nicely.
• Couldn't Find a Lighter: The end of the Majima no MajiROCK video has Majima indulge in this with a burning ledger page after setting fire to the headquarters of the gang he'd been fighting.
• Creepy High-Pitched Voice: His voice tends to go up several octaves when he's really acting crazy. It's rather unnerving in the prequel Yakuza 0 where he has an even-toned voice and seems to be far calmer and more dignified than ever, but some of his wilder or more violent attacks have his voice suddenly rise in pitch with his classic "Mad Dog Style" in particular having him practically cackling and shrieking with unhinged glee.
• Cruel to Be Kind: Downplayed as striking his then-wife Mirei Park for not telling him about having an abortion wasn't necessary at all, but his decision to leave her falls into this as he felt that he was holding her back from accomplishing her dreams as an idol. Considering she just started her career at 18 years old, it would be hugely scandalous if their secret marriage came to light not to mention Majima himself was well on his way to becoming a notorious crimelord. Sadly, this decision was something of a Senseless Sacrifice as her agency found out about the secret marriage existing anyway. Out of hesitation, her agency let her career suffer a slow death via a refusal to promote her any further.
• Costume Evolution: Downplayed. He went from two gold chain necklaces of varying lengths in the first game to merely one while his irezumi tattoo went from some indistinct blue oni-like entity on his torso to the full-blown Hannya and white snakes he's become iconic for. Also from 3 onwards, his Eyepatch of Power now sports a silvery snake.
• Dance Battler: His Breaker Style can best be described as a combination of capoeira and break dancing.
• Dark Is Not Evil: Always wears a lot of black and prefers black suits whenever he has to dress formally, often with a scarlet shirt underneath but he's been on the hero's side in every game aside from the first one. Further emphasized in Yakuza 0, where his "Mad Dog" style has a black Heat aura in contrast to Kiryu's "Dragon" style having a white one.
• Dead Man Walking: During his chapter in Dead Souls, there's a point he gets bitten by a zombie. By Kiryu's chapter, his eye has gone red. He then goes to a sauna to try and sweat it out. Turns out he's completely fine. The zombie that bit him was an old man with dentures and his bloodshot eye is due to his allergies. April is pollen season.
• Demoted to Extra: Later games have him take a much less active role in the story, due to circumstances forcing him out of the story.
• Depending on the Writer: A common complaint about Majima's portrayal in Yakuza Kiwami is that his characterization comes off as rather inconsistent, in no small part due to the shot-for-shot remastering of the original's cutscenes. This includes having to recreate his personality as described in Characterization Marches On. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the game, the Majima Everywhere mechanic portrays him as the zany-but-still-considerate man he is chronologically later in the series. This ends up causing some Mood Whiplash moments with him that even his insanity can't hand wave for some players. For instance, in one moment Majima can be challenging Kiryu to a friendly game of bowling, then whacking one of his subordinates to near-death for not laughing at a joke not even five minutes later.
  • An argument can be made that he's a lot nicer when interacting with Kiryu on his own or with only civilians around while when surrounded by his henchmen and fellow Shimano Family men, he has to keep up his reputation as a vicious "Mad Dog" since his underlings aren't present in his nicer moments in Kiwami like the Majima Everywhere cutscenes. It's still incredibly jarring nonetheless especially since he stopped acting like that around his underlings in later games. Then another argument can be made that with his boss Shimano dead in later games, he doesn't have to keep up the act since part of the reason he started acting more unstable in the first place was to be less predictable to his own boss after the events of 0. Depending on how you look at it, evidence towards this argument can be found near the end of Like a Dragon, where he gives genuinely good insight during Arakawa and Aoki's funeral only to backpedal and say he's back to being the Mad Dog afterwards.
• Depraved Bisexual: In the first game, he threatens a woman named with a knife asking her if she wants to be his girlfriend apparently only letting her go free because she admits to having a boyfriend. Kiwami also has him outright stalking Kiryu with some of his schemes and methods to provoke him having a somewhat concerning level of sexuality to them even if they're usually Played for Laughs.
• Devious Daggers: Specializes in knife combat and is an especially pragmatic and tricky fighter who delights in confounding friend and foe alike.
• Deuteragonist: Evolves from a Recurring Boss in Yakuza 1 to the Deuteragonist of the series as a whole, reflecting his Breakout Character status. From 2 onwards, his relationship with Kiryu grows into vascillation between friendly rivalry and being one of his most reliable allies. Chronologically, this reached its' peak in Yakuza 0, where Kiryu splits the role of protagonist evenly with Majima.
• Did Not Get the Girl:
  • Yakuza 5 reveals that he had been previously married to Mirei Park, a then-rising idol. After she had an abortion without telling him, he left her so she could pursue her idol career, which eventually tanked. They planned to meet each other again twenty years later and reconcile, but Park was murdered before they could.
  • Years before in Yakuza 0, Majima was tasked to kill a blind woman named Makoto Makimura, but he fell for her instead, and nearly lost her to a life-threatening injury. When the two meet again after she recovers, Majima stays silent so she doesn't recognize him, wanting to keep her far away from the dangers of the yakuza, and urges her doctor to take care of her instead. When he meets her again almost 18 years later in Kiwami 2, he learns that she had already gotten married and started a family, and she later leaves Japan to live abroad.
• Disguised in Drag: One of the many personas he adopts in Kiwami is the tattooed, one-eyed hostess "Goromi". Yeah, Kiryu isn't fooled for a second, but he still plays along with it.
• Domestic Abuse: Downplayed as he only struck his ex-wife, Mirei Park, once in their entire marriage due to her aborting their child without telling him about it at all.
• Doppelgänger Attack: Inexplicably, Majima is shown to be capable of materializing clones of himself when he's fought as Saejima's Final Boss in 5. This move returns in Like A Dragon and Infinite Wealth, where it could just as easily be a battle fantasy of Ichiban or Kiryu under Ichi's influence, but considering the aforementioned fight in 5, who knows?
• Do Well, But Not Perfect: In 0, he's forced to work as manager of the Omi Alliance's Cabaret Grand and earn enough money so he can be accepted back into the Tojo. And he does a spectacular job as a manager. Perhaps too spectacular, as his boss/jailer Sagawa reveals to him that the Omi would not want to let go of their golden goose just yet, so they raised his debt to five times the original amount. The only way for Majima to pay his debt is if he carries out an assassination as part of Shimano's Batman Gambit to acquire the Empty Lot for the Omi.
• The Dragon: To Shimano in the first game.
• Dual Boss: With Saejima in Like a Dragon. In a bit of a variation, he's fought by himself at first only for Saejima to join in the second phase.
• Dual Wielding:
  • After unlocking "Slugger" Style in 0, one of the training sessions with Fei Hu has the arms dealer teach Majima how to use kali sticks. After said training is over, Majima is given the ability to use not only kali sticks but also other dual weapons from dual wooden katanas to spiked kali sticks^*Actually just nails hammered through kali sticks that deal cutting instead of blunt damage and many more.
  • Another specific HEAT move for "Slugger" style is "Essence of the Slugger: Hack Hit" which has him wield his Demonfire Dagger in conjunction with his Pummeling Bat.
  • Bizarrely enough, his official render for the original Yakuza depicts him wielding a knife in both hands even though we never see him with more than a single knife on him in this game or any other game for that matter.
• Dueling Player Characters: Subverted in 0, where he never actually meets Kiryu until after the main story. He becomes a "fighting a previously playable character" example in Kiwami, given that his movesets in that game are lifted directly from 0.
• Early Installment Character-Design Difference: His hair was shorter and his skin was a lot paler in the original PS2 games, especially in the first game where he bordered on having an Undeathly Pallor.
  • In the first game specfically, his tattoos are asymmetrical, being only visible on one side of his chest as opposed to the symmetrical look it has in every single other game including the immediate sequel that was still a PS2 game. Probably justified since 2 was the first game to have him take off his jacket and expose his full torso tattoos.
  • The first game is also the only time he's ever worn two golden chain necklaces at the same time with one being longer and hanging more off of his shoulders than the other. Every other appearance has him wear only a single gold chain. Probably the one distinct trait of his appearance in the first game that was retained in the Kiwami remake.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: Was a lot more of a truly villainous lunatic in the first game than the rest of the series, which can come off as odd for players who played Kiwami immediately after 0; while he wasn't involved too much in the main plot and mostly only did heinous stuff in an attempt to fight Kiryu, modern-day Majima wouldn't do things like kidnapping Haruka to achieve that goal and he doesn't randomly beat his underlings (well, he does, but it's Played for Laughs in later games). Kiwami attempts to reconcile the two conflicting aspects of his character with the "Majima Everywhere" system where his obsession with Kiryu is largely Played for Laughs, and while his villainous and ruthless moments from the main story are largely unchanged, it's strongly implied that he's a Punch-Clock Villain at heart who's Ax-Crazy persona is just that - a persona.
  • Gameplay-wise, the first game is the only time Majima's really utilized his men to act as a Flunky Boss. Considering his love of fighting and "fair" 1-on-1 showdowns, it certainly stands out and there's not even an explanation for why he needs to have his men fighting with him when he confronts Kiryu for a "fair fight". Further muddling things is while Kiryu's been established as a One-Man Army at this early point in the series which may justify such tactics, later games including the prequel 0 show that Majima is certainly no slouch in that department either which again makes one wonder what's the point of bring his men along. Then again, considering how it ends with Majima taking a knife to the gut to save Kiryu from an unfair attack from one of his men, it's possible he simply learned from the experience and has strived to make sure he only engages Kiryu on his own as a proper Duel Boss going forward.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: He went through physical and emotional hell over the course of the series, but as of Like A Dragon he finally seems to have his life together; he's reunited on good terms with his oath brother Saejima, and thanks to the Tojo Clan choosing to shut down he's finally getting to leave the crime world and lead an honest life (while still maintaining his pride as a yakuza and opportunity to fight people since he'll be working as a bodyguard alongside his fellow Tojo Clan alumni). He also recently found out that Kiryu is still alive, which will no doubt keep him very occupied and happy.
• Eerie Pale-Skinned Brunette: He's always been on the pale side compared to other characters but it's especially prominent in the original PS2 games, particularly in the first game when he was legitimately unsettling in his madness.
• Establishing Character Moment: The prelude to his fight in the first game. Majima saunters over, all confident in himself and quite intimidating, before being smacked in the face by a baseball. He laughs it off, before beating one of his subordinates pretty badly for not laughing with him. This is more indicative of his personality in 1 however, as he grows a lot more caring and less intimidating by the second game.
• Everyone Has Standards: Built up a reputation for himself as an unhinged "Mad Dog" with Bad Boss tendencies. Yet even he was visibly shocked when Mine brought Kiryu a suitcase containing the severed head of Tsuyoshi Kanda as a form of "taking responsibility" for lending so much money to a guy who would cause to much trouble for the Tojo Clan's fourth chairman.
• Evil Laugh: An ever present part of his boss fights throughout the series is the way he cackles like a maniac as a taunt usually after knocking Kiryu to the ground with a damaging hit. Naturally, becoming a playable protagonist in 0 offers the player to engage in some unhinged cackling if they've unlocked his optional "Legend" style in which he fights with his signature tanto.
  "HEEEEEEEEEEE HEE HEE HEE HEH HEH HEH!!"
• Experienced Protagonist: In 0, compared to Kiryu. He may not be the legendary Mad Dog of Shimano quite yet, but while Kiryu starts out as a low-ranking almost-nameless rookie, Majima already has a fair share of notoriety in the Tojo Clan by the time the game starts thanks to his connection to Saejima and the infamous Ueno Seiwa hitjob. Notably, Kiryu recognizes Majima's name and reputation when their plotlines start intertwining, but not vice versa.
• Expository Hairstyle Change: Between 1985 and the events of 0, he grew his hair out long enough to pull it into a ponytail. He goes back to his old hairstyle by the end of 0.
• Eyepatch of Power: Lost his left eye before any of the games took place, the cause of which was finally explained in Yakuza 4 and revisited in 0. As far as he's concerned, he was too powerful with both of his eyes.
  • Beginning in 3, his eyepatch would have a distinctive silver snake adorned upon it.
  • Like most examples, it really doesn't seem to affect his fighting capabilities at all or any other physical activity for that matter. Notably, the one time Kiryu tries to take advantage of it is in Kiwami 2 during a Quick Time Event and it doesn't actually work. While successfully executing the button prompt prevents Kiryu from getting sliced across the chest by striking Majima's knife arm first, he then tries to go for a punch aimed at Majima's blindspot on the eyepatch side of his face only for Majima to still manage to dodge it.
• Face of a Thug: In Yakuza 0, countless characters compliment Majima by telling him how remarkable, thoughtful, and well-meaning he is, and never would have guessed because of how intimidating and scary-looking they thought he was at first. He's not exactly flattered by the compliment.
• Failed Attempt at Drama: When Majima and his men confront Kiryu in the batting center in the first game. Majima gives this dramatic speech about how he and Kiryu are destined to fight each other, until he gets beaned in the head by a baseball because he accidentally walked in the path of a pitching machine.
• Fake Defector: In the climax of Yakuza 5, he joins forces with Kurosawa instead of taking him out like he planned. However, Majima only aids him because Haruka's life is on the line, and is willing to give up his own life in place of hers.
  Majima: I couldn't do it... She means more to Kazzy than life itself. I couldn't just let it happen.
• Faking the Dead: Throughout the entirety of Yakuza 5, he does this in a failed attempt to discover and take out the game's Big Bad, It didn't work out completely like he planned.
• Feeling Their Age:
  • In his sparring match with Saejima in 4, both of them, now in their 40s, lament how their age is starting to catch up with them. A major plot-point of 5 is Majima and Saejima feeling old and unneeded in the modern age of yakuza. This, of course, doesn't stop them from being One-Man Armies who could easily trounce anyone in their path. By the end of the game, they've gotten over this feeling.
  • Seemingly averted by the time of Like a Dragon where Ichiban's crew stand no chance against him and he has to be reminded by Saejima that he's in his 50s when he mocks Daigo for being so popular among people significantly older than him.
• Female Gaze: The Majima Saga in Kiwami 2 has a brief instance where he sits down in a chair during a Tojo Clan meeting, fidgeting about and complaining about how uncomfortable the seat is. His spread legs combined with the low, up-close camera angle offers a somewhat gratuitous crotch shot of the leather-clad man.
  • Gets the exact same sitting crotch shot again in the ending of Like a Dragon while attending Masumi Arakawa's funeral.
• Flanderization: In Kiwami, where the newly introduced "Majima Everywhere" system amped up his madness by turning him into a deranged, obsessive stalker who apparently spends his free time tailing Kiryu, planning ambushes from inside garbage cans and sewers, and coming up with increasingly zany scenarios to get Kiryu to fight him. It's particularly notable because Kiwami was released at a point of time in the series where Majima's madness was already being largely toned down; he was portrayed as being a serious, if not outright somber character throughout most of 4, 5 and 0, and he only really switches to his "Mad Dog" persona during battles or when it's appropriate to play it up.
• Flash Step: While using Quicksteps to outmaneuver enemy combatants isn't unique to him at all, he's always been one of the biggest champions of this method of combat since the series' impetus with 3 and 4 featuring some of the his most aggressive abuse of this technique to the point where he's practically teleporting around Kiryu.
  • Carries over to his playable appearance in 0 in which he can perform two consecutive Quicksteps by default as well as with his unlockable Legendary Mad Dog of Shimano style which also has the unique "Shadow Slide" technique that lets him slip away from attacks while blocking. This naturally also carries over to the Kiwami remake of the first game where his Quickstep allows him to slip behind Kiryu where with ease. It's to the point where a sharp eye may notice that he's clearly got a better Quickstep than he did as a playable character, with Slugger Majima being noticeably agile compared to in 0 where that fighting style was clearly his Mighty Glacier style with a quickstep shorter and less effective than that of his other styles.
• Flunky Boss: Only when Kiryu fights him at the batting cages in the first and its remake. Otherwise he almost always averts this as Duel Boss.
• Foil:
  • To Kiryu, unsurprisingly. Where Kiryu's stoic, calm exterior hides a fiery and hot-headed inner nature, Majima is outwardly loud, capricious and colorful, masking the serious, intelligent mind beneath. Kiryu's combat style is focused on strength and speed over style and finesse; Majima is weaker, but with a great emphasis on technique and skill. Kiryu rarely uses weaponry, with only Beast style and certain Dragon abilities focusing on them; Majima is a Multi-Melee Master, wielding a Baseball Bat in addition to his infamous dagger. Finally, Kiryu chose to walk away from the Yakuza lifestyle to protect his loved ones, while Majima has consistently and actively participated in that lifestyle for most of the series primarily because Kiryu keeps pushing him to support the Tojo Clan and especially to support Daigo.
  • Also with his oath-brother, Saejima. Saejima is a gruff, practical man who exudes masculinity, while Majima is a manic, jovial wild card who eschews tradition at every turn. Saejima is enormous, using his immense size, weight and strength to hurl large objects with ease and swing people around like ragdolls or bash them into the pavement with no finesse. Majima is a lean, slight guy who uses weapons, deception and agility to create an unpredictable fighting style. Despite their differences, they're both honorable, tenacious men with an unbreakable bond.
• Final Boss: For Saejima in 5.
• Friend to All Children: A trait he shares with Kiryu. During his time in Sotenbori, Majima made a habit of helping out any kid he encountered on the streets, either through simple acts of kindness (e.g. buying stuffed animals for a lonely little girl) or defending them against malicious groups or individuals. Even after assuming the "Mad Dog" persona, children remain one of the surefire ways to bring out his inner goodness. Sure enough, when he finds said little girl outside the arcade crying with her toy slashed to pieces, he's absolutely livid.
  "Who did this!? I want names!"
• From Nobody to Nightmare: He started off as a lowly, nameless thug under the Shimano Family, running simple affairs for the Tojo Clan. After the botched Ueno Seiwa hit, he was thrown out of the clan completely, humiliated by being forced to serve the rival Omi Alliance as the manager of the Grand in Sotenbori. Then he was thrown headfirst into the thick of the most violent power struggle the Tojo Clan had ever experienced. This lead directly to him taking on the Dojima Family - the biggest, most powerful family in the Tojo Clan at the time - singlehandedly. He won, securing his reentry into the Tojo Clan by way of Shimano; come Yakuza Kiwami, he's a respected and feared patriarch with his own family. Around Yakuza 4, the Majima family has absorbed the remnants of three large defunct families, Dojima, Nishikiyama and Shimano, and is the single largest power bloc in the Tojo clan.
• Gilded Cage: In 0, Majima is located in Sotenbori, working as a manager of the Grand, one of the biggest hostess clubs in Osaka, where money flows like a golden river under his management and the respect for him knows no bounds. However, he's aware that everything was set up by Shimano, who excommunicated him from the Tojo Clan, and that he can't leave Osaka and join yakuza until he's repaid his debt. Just to emphasize the point, Chapter 3 of 0; the chapter in which Majima first appears, is called "The Gilded Cage".
• Goldfish Poop Gang: He becomes this in Kiwami, dogging Kiryu in both Random Encounters and various sidequests. That said, he's far stronger than the usual example and he only gets tougher and tougher the more he's fought until he's on par with the final bosses of the series. He may count as a subversion since while losing against him will have him spare Kiryu and simply tell him to prepare better next time, he heavily implies that if he wasn't holding back, he could easily kill Kiryu especially early on. Hell, losing against him in main story battles implies that he makes good on that boast since it's considered a game over.
• Good All Along: From 3 onwards, the games tend to play with the idea of Majima being considered a possible antagonist and accomplice in whatever criminal conspiracy is the current focus of the main plot. It never ends with him ever actually working for the perpetrators.
  • In 3, Makoto Date reveals that there's photographic evidence that Majima's had at least one illicit dealing with Minister Suzuki who's plans for the land around Morning Glory Orphanage make both of them very suspicious since it's clear that the goal of traitor is said land. As Kiryu considers the possibility of his good friend Majima having something to do with the current schemes that have gotten Kiryu's other friends hospitalized and in one instance outright murdered, he tells Date that he would have to kill Majima if it turns he had knowingly broken his promise to Kiryu earlier and is some sort of collaborator. Naturally one Boss Fight later and Majima confesses to being blackmailed by Goh Hamazaki, the real traitor who makes his move not much later after this revelation.
  • In 4, Taiga Saejima learns from his fellow inmate Goh Hamazaki that not only did his hit on Yoshiharu Ueno fail, but that it was all a big set-up, one that Majima apparently had a hand in planning. Saejima spends the entirety of his portion of the story searching for the truth and getting some payback for the hell he's endured being on deathrow for 25 years. Naturally, a couple of Boss Fights with the Majima Family later and it turns out Majima's no backstabber. In fact, the Shibata Family had to beat him down, chain him up, and carve out one of his eyes when he refused to let Saejima go through with the hit all on his own.
  • Downplayed in 5 in the sense that Majima's only briefly treated as an antagonist when the Big Bad hands him his knife and tells him to "start the show" with Saejima. It very quickly becomes clear that Majima and Saejima are being blackmailed into a Duel to the Death or else Haruka gets taken out by an assassin. Still, Majima goes out of his way to rile Saejima up by telling him that he had him expelled from the Tojo Clan earlier in the story because he feels like Saejima's gotten too weak to be a good leader. In the end, the two aging men clash just so they can have what could possibly be the last chance they have for a good fight with each other.
• Guest Fighter: He and Kiryu appear as partners in the crossover series Project × Zone. Prior to that, his Dead Souls incarnation appeared as a DLC character for the Japanese version of Binary Domain.
• Hairstyle Inertia: He's had the parting hair style since he was 20 years old in the 80's and he hasn't changed it since the first game. Apparently the only time he ever had a different hairstyle was the entirety of 0 in which he grew it out long and tied it into a ponytail. By the time of the ending, he's cut it back and hasn't looked back since.
• Handicapped Badass: Missing an eye, but the lack of depth perception doesn't slow him down in the slightest.
• Has a Type: Although Majima certainly has a thing for all kinds of women, the two that had the biggest impact on his life, Makoto Makimura and Mirei Park, were both half-Japanese and had short dark hair.
• Heartbroken Badass: He's had the chance for a normal life with Makoto and Mirei, but circumstances drove a wedge between them. For Makoto he spends the entirety of 0 protecting her, but ultimately leaves her to a normal life as he knows how dangerous the yakuza lifestyle is. For Mirei, she wanted to be successful as an idol, already facing pressure due to her Korean roots and had an abortion without telling Majima. He left her, but because he truly wanted her to follow her dreams and only gets worse when she's murdered because of a letter he entrusted her with. It's implied they still held torches for each other, but even if Park hadn't been murdered they'd been in two separate worlds for so long it was unlikely they'd get back together.
• He Cleans Up Nicely: 3 and 4 showed that he can pull off a more professional look in a crisp black suit and tie. However 0 truly shows what he's like when he's really trying to present himself as the classy, respectable "Lord of the Night" with a clean-shaven face and long smooth hair tied up into a neat ponytail all wrapped up in a black tuxedo.
• Heel–Face Turn: He's been a face for so long it's easy to forget that he was most certainly a villain in the first Yakuza game.
• Hellbent For Leather: His Iconic Outfit, is just full of leather. From a snakeskin-patterned jacket, leather trousers, a pair of leather gloves, and snakeskin-patterend leather shoes with metal toe tips.
• Hidden Depths:
  • He may look like a rough thug and acts like a complete psycho, but Majima is also a skilled businessman. In the 80's, he turned two struggling hostess clubs into major money makers, and decades later is in charge of a profitable and legitimate construction company, in addition to running his own family in the Tojo clan to cockblocking two upstarts in a bid for the Captain position in the Tojo Clan at the very last moment when everyone thought he wasn't bringing in money.
  • The only thing in his room while he's stuck in his gilded cage situation in 0 is a radio. Given how well he sings during this time, it's another hint to his enjoyment of music.
  • He's pretty serious about taking better care of the environment. It was all the talk back in the mid-eighties, and he loses his shit in Kiwami when he sees a man put his plastic in the trash instead of the recycle bin where it belongs, thinking it's a man's civic duty to do so.
  • In Kiwami, he genuinely gets hooked on Pocket Circuit. While most other instances of him getting into activities like this could be handwaved as him wanting to beat Kiryu at them, he spends far too much time on Pocket Circuit for this to be the case. He even outright tells Kiryu that he doesn't care about fighting him at the moment upon first discovering the Pocket Circuit Stadium, which he refers to as 'some kinda wonderland.' It should be noted that if you try to enter the Pocket Circuit Stadium while playing as younger Majima in Yakuza 0, he writes it off as a dumb place for kids.
  • A number of comments he makes across games show he has a deep interest in baseball beyond using bats to clobber people, such as calling out Nishitani for not knowing the rules of the game in a metaphor he was using to try and goad Majima into a fight and (boss fight and Majima Everywhere notwithstanding) he doesn't try and attack Kiryu at the batting cages as he considers it almost sacred ground (helps that the cages were one of his and Saejima's favorite haunts before Saejima went to jail). He would've get along well with Shinada.
  • Majima no MajiROCK slips another nod to his love of music in during one of Majima's verbal interjections between verses. Specifically, Majima comments to Kiryu that he takes singing just as seriously as he does fighting, something that isn't obvious given his preference to go in for Stylistic Suck.
• Hidden Heart of Gold: He presents himself as a cold-hearted gangster at best and a cackling psychotic lunatic at worst, but beneath all the masks, Majima is a genuinely good person who wants the best for his loved ones and is willing to sacrifice a lot of himself to achieve that end.
• Hollywood Tone-Deaf: Invoked. As revealed in 0, Majima can sing perfectly well; when he's in his Mad Dog persona, though... hooh boy.
• Hopeless Boss Fight: It's technically possible to beat Majima in his first fight in Kiwami, but seeing as he's far more difficult than in the first Majima Everywhere battle and Kiryu's gotten rusty from a decade in jail, you're probably not going to win. To put it in perspective, Majima will use moves here that you won't see until you reach 'Rank SSS' in Majima Everywhere (namely his spinning slash and knife-charge.)
• The Hyena: To an extent as his taunts in battle nearly always has him erupt into high-pitched cackling. Played much straighter in the Majima Everywhere system of Kiwami in which Voice Grunting used during most in-game cutscenes will lead to you hearing a distinctive "YAHAHA!" nearly everytime you talk to the guy. Naturally his aforementioned Evil Laugh is present as his taunt during the Majima Everywhere battles as well.
• I Am Not Left-Handed: Majima has a habit of holding back in fights where he thinks the other person is too weak to fight properly. This is less about kindness and more his expectation of just being that much better than everyone else. With some, notably Kiryu, he holds back to get them to develop to a stage where he can fight someone at his best. During his fight with Ichiban and his crew, Ichiban and his crew are gasping for breath after fighting both him and Saejima. Note that they outnumber them 6 (or 7, if Eri is along for the ride) to two. Majima and Saeijima are not only not really injured (Majima has a bloody lip) but they've been holding back considerably the whole fight. Fortunately for Ichiban, things are interrupted before the pair can go all out.
• Identical Grandson: Much like Kiryu and Miyamoto Musashi, Kenzan heavily implies that Majima's ancestor was the infamous chain-and-sickle master Shishido Baiken, who's real name was apparently Majima Gorohachi.
• The Idiot from Osaka: Invoked. Yakuza 4 shows that while he's not a born Osakan, he has adopted a (blatantly fake, referred to by the developers as the "Majima dialect") Kansai accent throughout most of his life. The "idiot" part comes in when he adopts the zany, unpredictable Mad Dog of Shimano persona, where many of the scenes he's involved in are played for comedy and where he does some pretty roundabout things.
• Image Song:
  • "Majima no MajiROCK", a bonus music track sung by Majima's voice actor given to those that preordered Kurohyō 2: Ryū ga Gotoku Ashura hen.
  • "Reign," which plays over his last extended combat sequence before his final bosses.
• In Love with the Mark: In 0, Majima is tasked with carrying out a hit on Makoto Makimura in order to be allowed back into the Tojo Clan, only to be unable to go through with it after his mark is revealed to be a young blind woman. He then changes goals to prioritize protecting Makoto as she's embroiled in a bloody power grab among the Tojo Clan, and Majima slowly falls in love with her over the course of the game. As it turns out, Shimano was the one who ordered the hit, knowing that Majima wouldn't be able to go through with it, and he fully counted on Majima and Makoto developing a bond— all so that Makoto could be persuaded to sell the Empty Lot to Shimano.
• Incoming Ham: In Kiwami, you'll generally hear Majima before you see him.
  Majima: KIRYU-CHAN!
• In-Series Nickname: In 0 at least, several different people seem to be fond of calling him "Slim". He also refers to Kiryu almost exclusively as "Kiryu-chan."
• The Insomniac: In 0, anyway, the real Makimura notes while massaging him that she can tell he hasn't been sleeping well at all, something he wearily admits to. Justified as his situation at the start of the game is far from ideal.
• It Amused Me: While there usually is a method to his madness, at least some of his weird antics is done to purely to annoy and frustrate both his peers and his enemies, simply because he thinks it is entertaining.
• I Want My Beloved to Be Happy:
  • It's revealed in 5 that he was secretly married to Mirei Park, and she had an abortion without telling him to protect her career as a pop idol. While he was angry at to the point of her hitting her once, and then left her afterwards, he also told her that he didn't want to get in the way of her pursuing her dream. In the ending of Yakuza 0, he also leaves Makoto in the care of her doctor after making sure he'd do anything to protect her, deliberately avoiding talking to her because he doesn't want to drag her back into the crime world and wants her to just live a normal life without him despite his feelings for her. Also in 5, he is willing to die to keep Haruka alive because she means the world to Kiryu.
  • The Majima-exclusive karaoke song in Kiwami 2 "Shiawase nara ii ya" ("It's fine as long as you're happy") is all about this. The lyrics are sung from the point of view of a man who is willing to undergo all sorts of pain and hardships and wouldn't care in the slightest so long as his beloved is happy. The music video features tender moments he had with Makoto in 0 to highlight this point. Bring your tissues.

J-R

• Jerk with a Heart of Gold:
  • In Dead Souls, he harshly yells orders at the survivors barricaded in the building to block the entrances to keep the zombies out as well as find any food or water to ration out. A moment later after sending the survivors their orders, a little girl thanks Majima, catching him off guard. She asks if he's there to save them, in which Majima's demeanor softened, saying that yeah, he's there to save them. The girl praises him, comparing him to a superhero, and goes to do what she can to help out. Majima then commented how that moment "killed his buzz" from before.
  • Has an opportunity to take down the Big Bad Kurosawa in 5 having cornered him in his living quarters with all his men lying in a bloody heap. However upon Kurosawa revealing that he has a hitman with their sights trained on Kiryu's adopted daughter Haruka, Majima relents and is willingly captured.
  • Majima takes orders from "the strong", but it's clear that this he will not do things that go against his moral code. For example, he refuses to kill Makoto in 0 due to her being a blind, helpless civilian and a woman.
  • In Kiwami, he speaks disparagingly of his time running a cabaret club in Sotenbori back in the late Eighties— he was strong-armed into the role by the Omi Alliance and greatly resented being exiled from Tokyo and put in a Gilded Cage— but he recalls the hostesses who worked for him with genuine fondness, and Kiryu (quite accurately) deduces that he didn't hate those days; he just hates reflecting on them now because he misses the friends he had.
• Just Toying with Them: In Like a Dragon, It's all but stated that this is how he and Saejima fights in regards to Ichiban and his party. Aside from the fact that their attacks are mostly incomplete versions of their standard attack strings, the following cutscene has Ichiban's party utterly exhausted while the two are mildly winded at most and are only stopped from putting in actual effort by Arakawa interrupting them.
• Formal Characters Use Keigo: In 0, he uses keigo on the clock. He swaps seamlessly from immaculately mannered host to scowling ex-yakuza within the space of a few seconds in several instances.
• The Lancer: Complete with being Kiryu's foil! From Yakuza 2 onwards, he steadily grows into this role for Kiryu, becoming one of his most reliable allies.
• Leitmotif: All of which are remixes of "Receive You":
  • "Receive You - The Prototype" in 1, 2, Kiwami and Kiwami 2.
  • "Receive and Stab You" in 3.
  • "Receive and Bite You" in 4. It returns in Like a Dragon with a vengeance whenever Ichiban summons him, in Gaiden during his special Coliseum match, and when he activates his own variant of Dragon's Resurgence for his Infinite Wealth boss fight.
  • "Receive and Slash You" in 5.
  • "Receive You the madtype" in Kiwami.
  • "Receive You The Hyperactive" in Like A Dragon which he shares with Saejima.
• Large Ham: Majima frequently uses over-the-top theatrics and hot-blooded scenery-chewing to unnerve both enemies and allies alike.
• Laughably Evil: A weird example in Kiwami with him being pretty laughable in all the new content such as the Majima Everywhere System encounter and evil in the scenes in the main story taken from the original game. He's definitely comedic and eccentric in his obsession with trying to get a fight out of Kiryu but in all the scenes from the original game, he's legitimately unnerving despite still being friendly towards Kiryu. Naturally, this means that every other game averts it with the original game having him be simply evil if somewhat amusing in a creepy manner and a number his other games having him simply be laughable as he stopped being a villain after the first game.
• Laughing Mad: Ever since he dedicated himself to madness, he's been prone to high-pitched cackling in the midst of impressive displays of violence with his original Evil Laugh in the original game's Japanese being particularly unhinged sounding.
• Lean and Mean: Downplayed. He's definitely got some muscles but he's always been both skinnier and meaner than the likes of Kiryu. It's to the point where a number of characters in 0 refer to him as "Slim".
• Legacy Boss Battle: He's been a boss in every main game in the series except for 6.
• Let's Get Dangerous!: If he ever drops the Mad Dog persona in a game from 0 on, someone has done something to royally piss him off. It's best seen during the Final Boss fight in Kiwami 2: as he goes in for the kill against Kei Ibuchi, we get a close-up on his face, and the only thing on there is cold, focused fury.
• Lightning Bruiser: He's devilishly quick and agile, both as a playable character and as a boss, and while he lacks the raw strength of brutes like Saejima and Kiryu, he's far from weak and much less fragile than he looks.
• Lonely Bachelor Pad: And how in 0. Despite working for a prestigious nightclub, his apartment in Sotenbori is almost entirely unfurnished. He doesn't even have a mattress to sleep on, just a blanket, and his only luxury is a cheap radio tucked away in a corner. Presumably most of his actual income is being used to pay off his debt.
• Longhaired Prettyboy: Surprisingly, in 0. In spite of the eye patch he looks the part given that he's young, clean-shaven, and well-dressed. He ditches the long hair for his iconic hairdo in subsequent games after his Madness Makeover.
• The Mad Hatter: Played With. He's mostly just playing up the insanity as a means of confusing both friend and foe alike, but it's hard to deny how much he seems to enjoy and revel in being the "Mad Dog" everyone sees him as.
  • Yakuza 0 shows that a major part of the reason he became that way was because he found life as a classy and respected Cabaret Manager a terribly restrictive way to live. While it's still questionable if he's truly insane, there's no doubting how much happier he is to no longer be "caged up".
  "My mind’s made up. Right, wrong… Nobody’s got a clue what the difference is in this town. So I’m gonna have more fun… and live crazier than any of ‘em."
• Madness Makeover: As shown by 0, he has a much cleaner appearance in his youth.
• Manchild: He alternates between this and Psychopathic Manchild. He's an excitable, goofy madman who loves childish pastimes and dances around like a toddler - on his good days! He's also prone to sulking, throwing temper tantrums and beating people up at the slightest provocation or when they mildly annoy him. His latter tendencies are much more pronounced in the original PS2 back before his character was fully fleshed out.
• Mood-Swinger: Majima can switch from one mood to another by a flick of the finger. One second he's a calm and collected yakuza boss, he's a raving madman the next. And let's not get started on karaoke.
• More Expendable Than You: Part of his reasoning for joining Kurosawa in the climax of Yakuza 5 and agreeing to fight his blood brother to the death, in order to save Haruka and not just for Kiryu's sake.
  Saejima: You actually gonna do this, brother?
  Majima: We don't, and her dream dies in front of 50,000 people. Ain't many who'd mourn our deaths. Wasn't a hard choice.
• The Movie Buff: Dead Souls shows that he's a huge fan of zombie films and as such a Zombie Apocalypse scenario is basically a dream come true for him. It even shows up in Kiwami where one of the "Majima Everywhere" encounters has him hire a film crew to stage a zombie apocalypse to mess with Kiryu.
• Moveset Clone: His untrained default skills with a katana in 0 are directly lifted from Saejima's katana moveset in 4 and 5 except he also completely lacks any heat skills with the blade. On the other hand, his katana skills after training with Fei Hu grant him the Tennen Rishin moveset of his historical counterpart Soji Okita/Goro Hirayama from Ishin albeit not all of his moves and techniques.
• Mr. Fanservice: Probably qualifies about as much as Kiryu does in the prequel Yakuza 0 being young, clean-shaven, fresh-faced, more dignified, and wearing a dark, classy suit with a tall, slim, yet very much toned physique that gets a few shirtless scenes to show it off like when he first visits Makoto's massage parlor. Subverted more in the chronologically later games after his Madness Makeover, where despite constantly baring his chest and showing that he hasn't lost the physique, the games prefer to emphasize his wild and deranged demeanor more than any sexual appeal.
• Multi-Melee Master: In 0, as well as having two styles based on the usage of a knife and a bat, he can obtain and learn how to use various exotic weapons such as tonfas, nunchucks and dual swords.
• My Greatest Failure:
  • The failed Ueno Seiwa Hit in which he and Saejima were set up, which cost him his eye and landed his blood brother in prison. In 0, he's eager to get back into the Tojo Clan so he can make amends with Saejima when his sentence ends, and still laments about it in Kiwami. No wonder he's so somber in the previously released 4 whenever he talks about it.
  • The video for Majima no MajiROCK implies his failure to keep Makoto from harm during the events of 0 still bothers him, something that the video leads him to stop a hostess from being attacked and then tearing a bloody path through the gang the attackers belong to, despite clearly not even knowing her.
• Mythical Motifs: Mirroring Kiryu's association with a mythical creature, Majima is occasionally associated with Oni, as can be seen in his Hannya tattoo. His tattoo is more specifically a Shinja ("True Snake"), which is a particularly powerful and horrific form of the Hannya mask that depicts a woman so overcome with envy that she has transformed into a snake-like Oni, while his affinity for baseball bats can be also seen as an allusion to various Oni wielding a kanabo (iron club).
• Mysterious Past: Downplayed. Compared to other playable protagonists that have been in the Yakuza, we really don't have no idea of what Majima's childhood was like or why he decided to join the Shimano Family in the first place. All we really know is that he was already part of the Yakuza at 20 years old in 1985 and describes himself as ready to die the day he swore in under Shimano.
• Mysterious Protector: To Makoto in 0. He ends up being her guardian when she gets involved in the plot, and leaves her behind once everything is resolved.
• Mythology Gag: Majima's most damaging nunchaku in 0 being a pair of kama sickles connected by a chain and called "Baiken" is presumably a reference to Kenzan and his historical look-alike Shishido Baiken who wielded a similar weapon, a kusarigama or "chain-sickle".
• Neck Snap: A combination with Choke Holds, one of his "Thug" style HEAT moves in 0 is called "The Essence of Choking" as with most HEAT moves in the series is mostly non-lethal despite the Sickening "Crunch!" saying otherwise. The animation is reused when he sneaks up behind a Mook during the stealth segments with Makoto. It makes a return in Kiwami as a move he'll use when he's in "Thug" style and in HEAT mode, better make sure not to let Majima get behind Kiryu (although Kiryu can return the favor as "Essence of Choking" is an available move to himself.
• Never Bring a Knife to a Fist Fight: Downplayed. While his reliance on his knife lets him keep up with the insane strength of protagonists like Kiryu or Saejima who he often suffers losses to anyway, he's still very much a Strong and Skilled fighter with incredible agility and throwing out wicked kicks and haymaker punches that can easily knock grown men flat on their asses.
• Nice Guy: Was shown to be this during his exile in Sotenbori, helping people in need and being a Benevolent Boss towards his cabaret employees. His occasional blunt honesty and rough speech patterns when off the job downplays it a bit but he's still portrayed as a very pleasant, selfless man.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Remember how Yakuza 0 took place at the height of Japan's bubble economy? Guess who was indirectly responsible for bursting it?
• Noble Demon: Majima is actually quite honorable despite being a total nut, and his loyalty knows no bounds. As the series progresses on, the "Demon" portion of the trope fades more and more as he's depicted more and more heroically, despite still being a hardened criminal.
• Not Even Bothering with the Accent: His Kansai-ben actually has rather blatantly fake intonation, which the developers jokingly refer to as "Majima-ben". This is somewhat of a Throw It In!; he was originally supposed to have a normal, native Kansai accent, but his voice actor is Tokyo-born and raised and simply couldn't imitate a proper Kansai accent to save his life. Series writer Masayoshi Yokoyama decided it fit Majima's character and decided to leave it in.
• Nothing Personal: In Kiwami, after Shimano's death Majima sends Kiryu a text message stating that he doesn't plan on avenging his boss and won't hold any grudges for that specifically. Then again, it's not like Kiryu was the one who killed him anyway. While he does develop enmity towards Shimano's actual killer Terada, it's for completely unrelated reasons.
• No Sense of Personal Space: Similar to Akiyama in 4 and 5, Majima can taunt enemies while he's grabbing them in 0 while using Thug Style and he doesn't even need an upgrade to get heat off of it unlike his regular taunt. However, the way he grabs the enemy's head with both hands and puts his face right up to their's in the animation has shades of this trope.
  • In Kiwami, one of the Majima Everywhere random encounter intro animations you can have before a fight with Majima involves him sneaking up behind Kiryu as he's walking until Majima's practically breathing down his neck.
• "Not So Different" Remark: A variation in 4 where two other characters, Kiryu and Saejima compare the other to someone else they know with the implication that they're both talking about Majima. What's interesting is that neither one knows that the other is talking about the same person since they don't explicitly say it as well as the fact that they seem to see the resemblance for two different reasons. Kiryu knows Majima post-Madness Makeover so he presumably sees Saejima's hotheaded recklessness against insane odds similar to that version of Majima. Meanwhile, Saejima knows Majima prior to said Madness Makeover so he probably considers Kiryu's quiet determination and honorable nature similar to the Sworn Brother he knew 25 years ago.
• Now That's Using Your Teeth!: One of the HEAT moves he can learn from Adechi for "Breaker" style in 0 is using his teeth to stop a katana (wooden or metal) mid-swing with his chompers, kicking the guy in the head, and then slapping the sword sending it right back at their gut. While it'll impale them if it's a proper katana, a wooden one will just bounce right off (painfully mind you).
  • In the Kiwami remake of the first game, if he interrupts a street fight while using his Legendary "Mad Dog of Shimano" style, a cinematic plays where he throws his signature tanto high into the air before catching it by the blade using his teeth.
• Obfuscating Insanity: It takes several games, including one prequel, to get the full picture, but most of Majima's over the top antics from 1 and beyond are actually deliberate — meant to confuse, intimidate, and/or just plain troll both enemies and allies, alike. His true personality is that of a shrewd, cunning man who balances his thirst for violence with a strong sense of honor and loyalty. Whenever things get dire or when facing people he holds in high reverence, he drops the "Mad Dog" facade entirely and behaves in a far more professional manner. While there's a lot of examples in the tail end of the series, some of the best come from his campaign in Kiwami 2. It opens with Terada using a ploy to place someone loyal to him in the Captain's position based on their profit margin. Majima not only completely upends this by suddenly bringing in a huge pile of cash, he points out that if they followed Terada's rules he'd be Captain...and maybe Terada should be a bit more wary of pushing peoples buttons. Later, when met with betrayal and then set up to be a sacrificial pawn for the Omi's grand conspiracy, Goro doesn't even try to make light of the situation nor throw his usual wisecracks, having realized that the stakes are high and the costs too great in the event that he loses (and dies) at the hands of his opponent, Kei Ibuchi.
  • This is further cemented in 0 with the introduction of Nishitani, a character with a near-identical fighting style and demeanor to Majima from a time before Majima himself began acting that way. Given how much he grows to respect Nishitani over the course of the game, it can be inferred that this is where he drew the inspiration for his "Mad Dog" persona.
  • 0 also shows that he does have a geniunely crazy side too, but it's very different from his over-the-top persona and it takes a lot of pent up rage for him to get to that point. Namely, when he decides to storm the Dojima Family HQ by himself in the final chapter for the sole purpose of thrashing everyone there. He's slouched over like a feral animal and freaks out the yakuza inside, who note that he's "got a screw loose". This berserking version of Majima marks the chronologically first instance where he was referred to by his legendary nickname.
  Sagawa: You've got the eye of a mad dog!
• Oblivious to Love: In 0, to a frankly ridiculous extent. Not only does he initially not pick up on Makoto's feelings for him, he never realizes that all of the Platinum Hostesses working at his club are in love with him.
• Odd Friendship: It's frankly remarkable how the people he has the tightest bonds with tend to be far more serious and straight-laced compared to him. While the ever stoic Kiryu's the most notable example, there's also his dutiful oath brother Saejima to consider. Not to mention his friendship with the very professional Park and Katsuya to the point of outright being the former's husband at one point in time.
• Old Shame: In-Universe; in Kiwami, he doesn't have fond memories of the events of 0. This is pretty understandable. Even if you ignore the Trauma Conga Line that was his entire story arc in said game, he was forcibly roped into running the Grand by his boss, constantly having to put up with abuse from both terrible customers and Mean Boss Sagawa. He also self-consciously remarks that the "24 Hour Cinderella" costume was gaudy and hideous, and he can't believe he ever wore it. Lastly, he claims that running a Cabaret Club was a waste of his time. However, Kiryu isn't buying it, correctly pointing out that he legitimately cared about the girls who worked at Club Sunshine, and letting them go was painful. He still has enough attachment to his old life that, in Kiwami 2, he comes to aid Kiryu and Yuki in the Cabaret Grand Prix.
• Older Than They Look: The above picture of him in Like A Dragon? That's him at 54. It gets even sillier by Infinite Wealth when he's 58 and not even showing any gray hairs.
• One-Man Army: The second, fourth, and fifth games show that he's easily capable of this, although they happen offscreen. Exaggerated when he's Promoted to Playable in 0, which firmly demonstrates that he's right up there with Kiryu when he's sufficiently motivated.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: When ever Majima drops his "Mad Dog" facade and acts sober and collected, it is usually a sign that shit has really hit the fan.
• Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping: In-Universe; In a flashback in 4, Saejima comments on his Kansai accent slipping at one point.
• Out of Focus: As a consequence of faking his own death early on in 5, more time is spent investigating what happened to him rather than actually interacting with him with the only exceptions being Saejima's flashback with him and their reunion at the finale of the game. That said you do learn about his past and his relationships with new characters Mirei Park and Naoki Katsuya.
• Paper-Thin Disguise:
  • Most of his disguises aren't very good at hiding his identity. His idea of a disguise in 0 to spy on rival Cabaret Odyssey is to just wear sunglasses (at night even) and it isn't long before the manager identifies him. Possibly justified with the ones he wears in Kiwami since he's not really trying to hide who he is.
  • Hannya-man is actually pretty good; he's wearing his suit from Yakuza 0 (which Kiryu never saw) and a mask that covers most of his face. The problem is he didn't change his distinctive haircut, his pseudonym is a reference to his back tattoo, and he's wearing his eyepatch on the outside of the mask.
• Parasol of Pain:
  • His debut in the first Yakuza has him strolling in with an umbrella which he then uses to discipline an idiotic low-ranking goon and then uses it against Kiryu after the Dragon stops the Mad Dog from stabbing the poor mook with the umbrella tip.
  • The player can engage in this during 0, where unlike Kiryu he has his own unique HEAT move when holding the Gentleman's umbrella. It's both stylish and brutal.
• Pet the Dog:
  • Goro Majima can be unpredictable at times, showing that he's not completely evil despite being a Psycho for Hire. The same scene takes on a deeper meaning considering what we discover in 0 and 5.
  • Like Kiryu, he's made of this trope throughout Yakuza 0 in his substories and running the Sunshine Cabaret Club.
  • Despite normally being a Bad Boss to him, he apparently had a rather uncharacteristic moment of caring towards his underling Nishida in Online. Prior to Ichiban Kasuga being released from prison in the beginning of Like a Dragon, Nishida got separated from the rest of the Majima Family during the police crackdown on Tojo Clan yakuza and the subsequent take-over by the Omi Alliance. Apparently, the last words Majima told him before disappearing was to "go back to the countryside" presumably since that's where his hometown is and he'd be safer there.
• Practically Joker: The flashy, loud, often flamboyant, knife-wielding, occasionally nihilistic, psychotically violent yet amusing, moodswinging, cackling, Slasher Smiling Bad Boss of a Foil to a more serious, manly, straight-laced protagonist famous for refusing to kill his enemies. This is particularly prominent in the original PS2 game in which he was an outright unhinged maniac with creepy pale skin, stating that only he can be the one to kill Kiryu when his henchman tried to stab him with a knife, and being voiced by Mark Hamill in the English dub. The Kiwami remake also ramps up his violent obsession with Kiryu to such a degree that certain moments put Majima's sexuality into question.
  • Gets Played With more past the first game. While he's only become more comedic and eccentric over time, his stint as a villain has ended and his overall Character Development makes it debateable how much he still qualifies as one, particularly in games where Saejima is involved and he acts pretty sober and serious.
  • By the time of Yakuza: Like a Dragon, he's perked up considerably since 6, regaining both his comedic eccentricities and his violent, unhinged tendencies, effectively making him a heroic variant of this that still insists on fighting the heroes.
• Practical Taunt: His Slugger style taunt is to fluorish and twirl his baseball bat, damaging enemies in front of him multiple times. While it's not especially damaging, it usually breaks through blocks for guaranteed damage.
• Promoted to Playable: He's always been a major character in the series, and finally became playable in the spin-off Dead Souls. He was finally playable in the main series as the Deuteragonist of Yakuza 0, and Kiwami 2 introduces a new scenario following the events of the first game where he's playable once more.
• Progressively Prettier: Largely as a result of improving technology and in response to his increasing popularity. Just compare how he looks in 0 to the flashback scenes taken from 4 which was released 4 years earlier. Or better yet take a look at how much more of a creepy pale-skinned thug he used to look like in the PS2-era. 6 and later dragon engine games also use a rather fresh-faced model for Majima despite being his physically oldest appearances in the series.
  • Overlaps with Adaptational Attractiveness, when you consider how they used an altered, bearded version of his young and fresh-faced 0 model for the Kiwami remake of the first game on PS2 in with his aforementioned creepy, pale thug look. The same can be said for Kiwami 2 reusing his dragon engine appearance for another remake of a PS2-era game.
• Psycho Knife Nut: In SPADES. His signature weapon is a tanto given to him by Sagawa and dubbed the Demonfire Dagger in 0, which he handles with... rather disturbing fondness. His final unlockable stance in 0 gives you free reign to let loose with his knife skills.
• Punch-Clock Villain: Effectively retconned into this in his Kiwami portrayal. His unhinged and ruthless nature in the main story is largely intact, ensuring that he's still at his most villainous in the series. However, his expanded presence in the "Majima Everywhere" system has his Blood Knight tendencies Played for Laughs, establishing that his rivalry with Kiryu is not one of genuine malice. The implication is that on his own time he'd rather be a friendly rival to Kiryu, but when he's called upon to do the Dirty Business by his Yakuza associates, he will do so with ruthless determination. It's to the extent that unlike the Majima Everywhere battles in which Kiryu is able to lose fights without getting a Game Over and thus dying, further supporting the Friendly Rival attitude Majima's become known for in later entries, you will get a Game Over if you lose to him in story battles, showing just how seriously he takes the orders of his boss. He basically confirm it after you defeat him in a new added battle at the tail-end of the battle at Sera's funeral at Tojo Headquarters.
  I hadn't planned on steppin' into this shitshow but when the brass says jump, I say how high. Keeps morale up, y'know? But I think that's enough for now. We'll save the real fightin' for another time, eh, Kiryu-chan?
• Pungeon Master: He makes a lot of silly puns during his substories in 0.
  Majima: (at the end of Crossed Words) Your own words are what get ya through life's toughest spots. Even when ya gotta... cross words. Heh... High five, brain.
  Majima: (possibly during Disciple of the New Order) Wanna avoid dangerous cults? Just practice safe sects!
• Purple Is Powerful: One of the Tojo Clan's top fighters and consistently portrayed as having a purple Battle Aura. While Yakuza 0 gives him other fighting styles with their own uniquely colored Battle Auras, his signature knife-wielding "Mad Dog of Shimano" fighting style grants him a dark, smoky purple aura.
• Put on a Bus:
  • In Yakuza 4 Daigo sells him out to the cops and thus he's absent for the final confrontation. Considering that Majima is both a powerful patriarch and a top-class fighter he HAD to be taken out of the picture. He comes back at the end just in time for the inauguration of the Saejima family.
  • In 5 he spends most of the game pretending to be dead with a lot of his involvement going on behind the scenes. He only shows up for the final chapter.
  • In 6, he makes a brief appearance in the prologue, gets arrested along with Daigo in the opening chapter, and is absent throughout most of the game's story, only showing up again during the ending scenes. You can, however, use him in the Clan Creator mode if you purchase his card on the PSN store.
  • At one point early on in Like a Dragon, Adachi tells Ichiban that after the Omi Alliance took over Kamurocho in the wake of the diminishing Tojo Clan, the heads of the Tojo took their leave from the city while a still image shows the backs of Majima, Daigo, and Saejima as they leave through the gates of Kamurocho. They don't make a reappearance until much later in the game while Ichiban's crew is trying to sneak into the Omi Alliance HQ.
• Rage Breaking Point: After spending much of 0 being tossed around and manipulated by his superiors and generally undergoing near-constant emotional turmoil, Majima finally snaps near the end of the game after Makoto is shot by Dojima's men. Overcome with rage, Majima ignores Sugawa's orders, storms the Dojima Family HQ and goes absolutely ballistic on every poor bastard in his path.
• Real Men Wear Pink: Really starts with his big pink truck in 3. Then we get Yakuza 0 with his very Camp karaoke imagine spots, and his fluffy pink fan during his disco performances. In Kiwami, he also gets into Pocket Racing and MesuKing, and takes the trope literally as "Goromi".
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Gives a pretty harsh one to Kiryu in Kiwami after your first fight against him in modern times where you're most likely to lose to him, telling Kiryu straight just how pathetic he's become after not fighting for 10 years.
  Kiryu: Huff... Huff...! I'm not moving like I used to!
  Majima: So even you see it like it is. The past 10 years have made ya rusty and dull. Ya got no horsepower, and ya got no technique. Just another sorry punk fresh outta the joint. That's all ya are now. Kamurocho ain't so plush anymore. No way you're gonna make it on these streets.
  Kiryu: Damn...
  • That said, he does add on that despite how weak Kiryu's gotten, he still has "blazin' eyes" and thus encourages him to rebuild his lost strength and become even stronger than ever before... with a little help from Majima himself of course.
• Recurring Boss: The series' shining example
  • Is fought twice in both 1 and 3.
  • Taken to ridiculous extents in Kiwami, where Majima specifically stalks Kiryu in order to ambush him wherever he goes thanks to the "Majima Everywhere" system.
• Red Baron: The "Mad Dog of Shimano". At times he's referred to as "Mad Dog Majima" or the "One-Eyed Demon", and in 0 he's known as "Lord of the Night".
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: The red to Kiryu's blue. Although interestingly enough the roles were reversed in 0.
• Refuge in Audacity: His favorite tactic. Majima tends to get away with a lot of crazy stuff, simply because he does it in as flamboyant, over-the-top and in-your-face manner as possible.
• The Rival: Of the "friendly" variety with Kiryu. He's one of the only people in the series who can challenge the Dragon of Dojima in combat to the point where you're allowed to lose to him during the Majima Everywhere fights in Kiwami and still have the game continue on without a gameover. He is also the only person other than Kiryu who's confirmed to have beaten Jo Amon, leader of the Amon Clan, in single combat - a feat not even Komaki was capable of. This becomes downplayed after 3, the last game where Kiryu fights him (outside of a Super Boss fight in 5), and Majima becomes more involved with Saejima from then on.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: In 0, after Makoto is (non-lethally) shot, he storms into the Dojima Family HQ to rip everyone there a new one. He's only stopped from killing Sohei Dojima and his hitman Lao Gui by Sera.
• Rogue Protagonist: Framed as such with the prequel 0 featuring a kinder, softer, more reasonable and heroic side of Majima before ending the game with a more familiar gleefully unhinged and violent Majima who abuses his own goons setting up his villainous role in the first game.
  • The remake Kiwami further expands upon this with an extra scene where Majima tells Kiryu that trying to dedicate himself to being a more reasonable and benevolent Yakuza is only making things harder for himself in such an inherently cruel and often unreasonable lifestyle. Not to mention, he's now showcasing every fighting style he had in 0 further emphasizing how all those skills he learned as a more heroic and playable protagonist are now being used for the sake of being an antagonistic "Mad Dog" of a Recurring Boss wholly loyal to a nefarious brute.
• Running Gag: Despite his missing eye not slowing him down in battle, it's used as a joke a couple times, like missing a girl he was flirting with in Yakuza 0 because she was standing on the wrong side of the street, or peeking around a corner in The Movie on his eyepatch side.

S-Z

• Satellite Character: Usually averted but there have been certain games where it was played straighter:
  • In the first game, he was for the most part just a psychotic thug obsessed with the idea of fighting Kiryu and having a twisted sense of honor. The Kiwami remake cranks this behavior up with the Majima Everywhere system but also gives him some Hidden Depths moments that reference deeper aspects of his character in 0 and 4.
  • In 5, his lack of screentime limits him to only really interacting and having conversations with his oath brother Saejima. Thus any actual on-screen characterization is limited to his relationship with Saejima. That said, there are still hints at his personality despite this such as his willingness to sacrifice himself to protect Kiryu's adoptive daughter Haruka. We also do learn a lot about his past with his ex-wife Park Mirei and friendship with Naoki Katsuya, if only via second hand sources.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here:
  • He leaves the Tojo Clan in Yakuza 2 partially due to the way Terada handled the handling of the Clan Captain position. Expanded on in Kiwami 2 as he still respect Terada's decision even if he disagrees
    "The chairman shouldn't admit he is wrong even if it's true. You are the fifth chairman of the Tojo clan. if you say it's white, it's white. If you say it's black, it's black. That is yakuza world we live in. No matter your methods, if you think you are right, you are. But right or wrong... I think your methods suck.
  • Expanded on in Kiwami 2: After Ibuchi hires Ryota, a subordinate of Majima's to kill people in Omi turf and thus provoking a war. Majima was able to expose Ibuchi's plans but Ibuchi commits suicide to stoke the flames after failing to kill Majima. With war looming on the horizon, Majima willingly offers to disband his family in exchange for a temporary peace which is rendered moot as this was done with the planning of a certain Omi Clan member.
  • During the first Tojo meeting in Yakuza 3. When he sees all the families trying to up each other, trying to kill Kiryu or searching for the Kazama look-alike, while Kashiwagi is trying to be the mediator ... Majima told them to do whatever they want, he couldn't care less, before leaving the room.
  • Played for Laughs in a substory in Yakuza 0, where he swears off drug testing for life, and heads straight for the door when he's expected to stay on board for the sake of science.
• She-Fu: Gender-inverted example. He's shown to be very acrobatic as he cartwheels, flips, and twirls about for several attacks. Exemplified with his Breaker Style in 0 and Kiwami.
• Shotguns Are Just Better: His unique weapon in Dead Souls is a combat shotgun and even has his own exclusive MJM-class shotguns that are purchasable weapons in later games.
• Slasher Smile: At times, he'll show a particularly crazy grin with a wide eye. Some of his HEAT actions in 0 sport a pretty manic grin and smile. Special mention goes to a special HEAT move for the "Legend" style in 0 and defaul style in Kiwami 2, which has him kick his Demonfire dagger into his enemy, and pull it out with a large smile on his face.
• Spectacular Spinning: One of his attacks in Yakuza 4 has him spinning like a top wildly around the arena with his arms spread out, knife in hand, but leaves him exhausted for a good time when he's finished. His unlockable "Mad Dog of Shimano" fighting style in 0 allows him to do a variant of this, but it's brief and can also exhaust him.
• Spin Attack: His signature Tornado Cut, where he spins on one leg with his arms stretched out and blade in hand like a beyblade.
  • In its first appearance in 4, it was impossible to dodge as he would quickly home in on you while doing it. The only way to avoid taking any damage was to either grab one of the baseball bats on the edges of the arena and use those to block it, or have Saejima's Dragon God Defense upgrade which would allow him to block blades unarmed as long as he's in Heat mode. It reappears in a significantly nerfed state for his "Legend" style from 0 onwards merely being a crowd control attack with decent damage.
• Spirited Competitor: Apparently holds back against Kiryu as part of the Majima Everywhere system in Kiwami for most of the game. All for the sake of helping Kiryu get into shape after 10 years of not fighting in prison. After all there's no fun in crushing someone who's that much weaker than him.
  • In the same game, he also shows traits of this in the way he cheerfully challenges Kiryu to all sorts of non-violent activities/minigames like billiards, bowling, darts, and even Pocket Circuit Racing.
• Stance System: In 0 he's given his own, unique styles that contrast with Kiryu's.
  • "Thug" is his default. As opposed to being an unskilled brawler like Kiryu, Majima is more refined and precise but also pragmatic. He can disorient opponents with dirty moves leaving them open to nasty follow ups. Reliable and effective, but very straight-forward.
  • "Slugger" is based around the use of a pummeling bat, for both heavy swings and fancy twirls. Powerful in both offense and defense with good range coverage, but also his slowest style.
  • "Breaker" has Majima doing dance moves as attacks. Certain combos let him pose to gain a lot of HEAT. Quick and very good for crowd-clearing, but often leaves him off-guard. Although he can circumvent that with Freeze Counters.
  • And of course his Legendary "Mad Dog of Shimano" style, allowing players to actually play as Majima as depicted in his boss fights, being a Confusion Fu-centric Psycho Knife Nut. Lacks raw power, but the knife hits are decently deadly and usually unblockable.
• Stealth Mentor: In Kiwami, he stalks and fights Kiryu only to get him in a better physical condition and knock off the rust after his 10-year imprisonment. He even works alongside Komaki to help his old teacher train Kiryu.
• Strength Equals Worthiness: As mentioned in the quote above, it plays a large part in why he holds Kiryu in such high regard, but usually won't help him unless Kiryu bests him in a fight.
  • A large part of the reason why Majima's willing to go along with Saejima's plan to atone for his remaining crimes by returning to prison in Saejima's prologue in 5 is because he's sure he'll come out of the experience stronger than ever and worthy of being the powerhouse of the Tojo Clan. Of course, not before siccing his boys on Saejima just to make sure he's tough enough to survive another few years in prison in the first place. He even reveals towards the end of the game that the real reason why he sent his Family out to fight Saejima rather than take him head on was because Saejima had become too weak since returning against the Tojo Clan to survive against him. He's very pleased to see how much stronger Saejima's become two years later while acting as Saejima's Final Boss.
  • It's also the reason why he follows Shimano, acknowledging and admiring his brutality. Tellingly when Shimano bites it to Terada's gunfire after being defeated for the final time in the first game, the Kiwami remake saw fit to add in Majima texting Kiryu on the manner stating that he has no desire to get revenge for his boss' death. This seems to imply that he doesn't care if his boss dies if he wasn't strong enough to survive the encounter with Kiryu and his allies.
• Straw Nihilist: Very much downplayed, but he briefly dips into this at times when his "Mad Dog" persona falters, particularly in the Kiwami remake of the first game and his first extra scene with Kiryu after Kiryu tells him that he's not gonna fight Majima if there's no point even though Majima's already hit him multiple times to provoke him.
  "No point? You're just makin' things harder on yourself. Deprivin' yourself for no damn reason. You think the world gives two shits if there's a point or not? Keep that up and it'll break you."
• Strong and Skilled: Compared to the usual street trash wandering around, he's definitely this combining near superhuman agility and dexterity with surprisingly strong blows that can floor his enemies in seconds. Notably in earlier games as a boss fight, he has a tendency to weave in singular heavy punches into his usual crazy antics sending Kiryu flying if they connect.
• Stylistic Suck: Anytime Majima picks up the microphone at karaoke, he deliberately makes his voice sound as screechy and off-tune as humanly possible just to further add to the crazed, wacky image he projects. Yakuza 0 proves that he's actually a pretty good singer when he puts his heart into it.
• Super-Reflexes: During the dynamic intro to his fight against Kei Ibuchi at the climax of his new storyline in Kiwami 2, he dodges multiple gunshots at close range during the dynamic intro with the barrel right in front of his nose at one point, before he ducks underneath the bullet.
• Tattooed Crook: His tattoo is a very appropriate Han'nya figure accompanied by a pair of white snakes.
  • Interestingly if you play the series in release order, starting with the original Yakuza on PS2 though, you won't get to see it until Yakuza 2 where he enters his arena match against Kiryu in Purgatory without his iconic jacket, finally revealing the full irezumi on his back. Hell, what little of his chest tattoos that can be seen in the very first game suggest that he had a completely different vaguely blue oni-like design on his chest and that his famous Han'nya wasn't finalized until the second game. This is no longer true as of the Kiwami remake where he clearly has finalized design and engaging in the new "Majima Everywhere" mechanic will eventually culminate in a big showdown with Kiryu and Majima fighting at full strength in the batting cages. Naturally, the two of them discard their shirts prior to such a major battle.
• 10-Minute Retirement: In Yakuza 2, he leaves the Tojo Clan to start up Majima Construction, but he's convinced by Kiryu (the usual way) to go back, and does by the beginning of Yakuza 3.
• Terms of Endangerment: An interesting case with regards to the way he refers to Kiryu. "Chan" as an honorific is typically used either condescendingly or with a great deal of affection when used with men, and it can be argued that Majima intends both at the same time. He genuinely cares for and respects Kiryu, but also enjoys heckling him and egging him into conflicts.
• The Only One Allowed to Defeat You: He has this attitude toward Kiryu in the first game, demonstrated after his first boss fight when one of his underlings pulls a knife and Majima takes it for him.
  Majima: Kazuma... is my friend, you stupid fuck! Only I get the privilege of killing him!
  • He pulls this again in Yakuza 2 in the endgame, telling Kiryu that he'd better not lose to Goda since they still have unfinished business, and would mess him up if he did.
• Throwing Your Sword Always Works: Or knife rather. From 2 onwards he would often use a Quick Time Event that would involve him trying to stab, slash and kick at Kiryu while throwing his knife up in the air in between attacks. Notably, it ends with him punching the back end of the handle of the knife at Kiryu, punching and slashing him with a single attack before the knife somehow ricochets off the opposite wall perfectly for him to catch without missing a beat. It's as incredibly flashy as it is probably impractical. Knowing him, he's probably trying to distract Kiryu from his actual attacks.
  • The same could be said for all of his other knife-based Quick Time Events and Heat Actions which seem to all feature him tossing him knife at least once in the air before catching it. Even his two unique knife-based Heat Actions in 0 involve tossing his knife in the air before kicking the handle so that the knife stabs whatever poor sucker he's fighting.
  • It also comes into play in 0 during the fight against Homare Nishitani, a wild Psycho Knife Nut long before Majima became infamous for fighting just about the same way. The first time the knife flies into the air is due to Majima slapping it out of Nishitani's hand with the two jumping for it like basketball players reaching for a jump ball at the start of the game. A Quick Time Event dictates whoever catches it before slashing their opponent across the chest who then kicks it out of the catcher's hand sending it flying. The two then engage in bloody fisticuffs before they both realize the knife's falling down. They then kick at the falling knife at the same time with the Quick Time Event deciding who was lucky enough to kick the handle of the knife and who was unlucky enough to kick the blade and get stabbed through the foot instead.
• Tranquil Fury: People are a lot more scared of him when he's calm, like during a business meeting.
• Took a Level in Kindness: After the first game, his villain status was quickly discarded and his violent insanity and Bad Boss tendencies were portrayed as less frightening and more light-hearted and goofy. His loyalty to allies such as Kiryu and Saejima as well as his ability to act more mature, contemplative, and professional also started to get more screentime from 3 onwards.
  • Retroactively inverted between his very sympathetic backstory in the prequel 0 and the first game where he's at his most villainous and unhinged. He develops from a considerate and charismatic Benevolent Boss who risks his life for a blind woman into a psychopathic and needlessly violent Bad Boss who is later revealed in 5 to have struck his wife at some point between 0 and the first game. While the Kiwami remake has moments where he's willing to peacefully compete with Kiryu in harmless activities like Pocket Circuit Racing and Bowling, he also gets an extra scene in the beginning where he beats Kiryu over the head with an umbrella till he's bleeding because of a combination of feeling disrespected and a desire to start a fight with him.
• Undying Loyalty: He'd do a anything for the sake of those he cares about, especially Kiryu, Saejima, and Makoto Makimura.
  • Downplayed with regards to his boss Shimano. The Kiwami remake suggests that he's something of a Punch-Clock Villain who only attacks Kiryu on the orders of his boss and the moment Shimano dies, he makes it a point to tell Kiryu that he doesn't plan on taking any sort of vengeance for what happened though it probably helps that it wasn't Kiryu who gunned him down. Still, he describes himself in 4 as being unafraid of dying the moment he decided to start calling Shimano his boss. Also, despite all the terrible things that happens to him by the time of the end of 0 as a result of Shimano, he never once considers actually betraying him even when given a gun and pointing it right at his face only to hand it over to him and declare himself his loyal soldier through and through.
• Unwitting Pawn: He gets used by Shimano in Yakuza 0 as part of a massive Batman Gambit in a play for the Empty Lot. He's so physically and emotionally drained at that point that he goes full Heroic BSoD mode when he learns the truth.
  • In Yakuza 3, Hamazaki blackmails him into getting involved in some land deal with Minister Suzuki along with photographic evidence. With Majima implicated as being involved in the apparent assassination attempt on Daigo's due to said land dispute, Hamazaki was hoping to get Majima and Suzuki jailed for years while he gets to swoop in and reap the rewards of selling the land uncontested by the now comatose Daigo.
• Use Your Head: When the gang needs help accessing Purgatory's systems in Yakuza 2, his solution is to headbutt the desk repeatedly until it descends below. He had a hard hat on, though it probably made little difference.
• Varying Tactics Boss: Owing to the Kiwami remake of the first game incorporating all four of Majima's fighting styles from 0, you'll find yourself having to adapt to what is effectively four seperate recurring bosses that gradually get more difficult the more you engage with the Majima Everywhere system. Also the two major boss fights against Majima in the main storyline mix things up by having him swap fighting styles midway through.
• Villainous Cheekbones: He stopped being a villain after the first game but he always kept the rather defined cheekbones. It certainly helps him look more intimidating to the point where even when he was playing the role of a civilian cabaret manager in 0, he gets mistaken for a vicious thug semi-frequently.
• Wake-Up Call Boss: In Like a Dragon, he and Saejima mark a prominent bump in difficulty since they'll be at Level 50 when the previous boss is around Level 28. The game strongly urges the player to do some grinding prior to entering the Omi HQ and you'll even be introduced to a new arena fit for grinding when first introduced to Sotenbori.
• Warm-Up Boss: He's the first boss in Yakuza 3, which is by far the easiest fight against him, but a bit too easy to be the last in the game...
  • Inverted in Yakuza Kiwami, where he's the first proper boss fight in the entire game, a fight he will almost certainly win. The reason that this isn't a straight-up Hopeless Boss Fight is that it's technically possible to defeat him, netting you a bundle of XP for your troubles.
• Walking Shirtless Scene: His default outfit has him wearing a suit jacket that's always wide open. Like the others, he'll occasionally fight shirtless, exposing the Oni tattoo he wears on his back. Averted in 0, where he always wears a modest suit, only switching into his signature jacket at the very end of the game.
• Weak, but Skilled: He's this compared to Kiryu in 0. As opposed to Kiryu being all fists, and having crappy form for two of his styles, Majima uses acrobatics, trickery, and, through his Slugger style, mastery over several types of weapons.
• Whole Costume Reference: His iconic snakeskin jacket + black leather pants outfit is actually a near carbon-copy of the one Nicolas Cage wears in the role of Sailor throughout Wild at Heart, minus the shirt. See for yourself◊. This is deliberate because in the film, Cage's character sees the jacket as a symbol of his individuality and his belief in personal freedom, just like Majima himself.
• Wild Card: Majima runs on this; this is reflected in his combat style making considerable use of Confusion Fu, his extremely unpredictable nature, and his tendency to upset carefully-laid plans and schemes whenever he gets himself involved. That said, he usually ends up on the side of the heroes when all is said and done with the first game being the only real major exception.
• Willfully Weak: Majima specifically states that he and Saejima were holding back a lot on Kasuga's group after losing to them, being about to throw the kid gloves away and start taking them seriously until they were interrupted. As Kiryu, who Majima and Saejima are close to in terms of strength and skill, ends up wiping the floor with Kasuga's group by taking them seriously but still holding back, Kasuga's group was quite fortunate it didn't went that far as probably just one of them would have been enough to take them down considering how they fared against Kiryu.
• The Wonka: His wild, unconventional personality doesn't get in the way of his ability to run a Yakuza Family or legitimate business like Majima Construction. If anything, it seems to be great for both building morale and staying one step ahead of his enemies.
  • Downplayed in 0 in the Cabaret Czar questline which has a number of his platinum-ranked hostesses considering him rather eccentric despite being extremely competent at running a Cabaret Club.
• World's Best Warrior: While Kiryu and Saejima fiercely compete for the title of the resident World's Strongest Man, Majima is consistently hailed as one of the series' greatest and most dangerous fighters. He's often treated as pretty much on par with the former two despite never quite matching them in raw strength, suggesting that it's all due to his sheer fighting skill and mastery over weaponry, particularly the tanto dagger. It's very telling that Saejima of all the people describes Majima as "The Strongest Man I Know".
• Wooden Katanas Are Even Better: Fei Hu can teach him how to use a specific style when using Wooden Katanas. Of course, Majima can use and purchase real steel katanas for combat though the "Sturdy" unbreakable katanas he can equip are wooden unlike the Sturdy Katana that Shinada can use in 5.
• Wolverine Publicity: He is one of the most recognized characters of the series, and has been heavily marketed in his expanded roles in the Kiwami remakes. His popularity has also led him to become Kiryu's partner in Project × Zone 2.
• Worthy Opponent: Views Kiryu this way; Kiryu appears to reciprocate, although he also expresses exasperation at Majima's outrageous behavior several times.
• Would Hit a Girl: Unlike Kiryu, he's willing to fight women on equal terms as shown in Like a Dragon, where he and Saejima treat Saeko or Eri like any other combatant.
• Younger Than They Look: Lampshaded a lot in 0 to the point where is a Running Gag that he is irritated by the fact that other people keep calling him "sir" and "mister" despite him only being 24 by then. Ironically enough, the reverse occurs once he's reached his fifties, looking about the same as he did in his mid-thirties.
• Zany Scheme: A lot of the antics he gets up to in the "Majima Everywhere" system count as this, as he hides in the sewers, inside trash cans, in giant traffic cones, in the trunks of cars, paying businesses to let them be an impropteau arena for him and Kiryu, as well as employing various disguises, complete with personas for each of them, such as an earnest do-gooder of a cop concerned with the safety of the public, a flamboyant, popular dancer, a giggly and cutesy cabaret girl, a polite and gentlemanly bartender, and an intimidating, silent fighter wearing a mask, but the crowning jewel of his disguises is not only him, but his underlings all putting on makeup and pretending to be zombies with the help of a film crew. It should be noted that the last one is the only one to fool Kiryu!

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