Kazuo Kiriyama is the secondary antagonist of the 2000 thriller film Battle Royale. He is a mute teenager, who joined the Battle Royale, but unlike all the other players, he joined the death game willingly to kill as many people as possible.

He was portrayed by Masanobu Ando.

What Makes Him Pure Evil?[]

• He joined the Battle Royale willingly so he could kill as many people as possible, in contrast to all the other players, who were kidnapped and forced into playing the game.
• While he did look at Shuya when the latter lost best friend Yoshitoki, there is no indication he felt any sadness over this event, and Kazuo walked over Yoshitoki's body without a sense of pity or sympathy.
• He killed 5 students who were attacking him, including a girl who begged for his mercy, showing his sadism and lack of forgiveness.
• When two girls, Yukiko and Yumiko, tried to convince the students to stop playing the game and unite, Kazuo shot both of them to death, and used a megaphone to transmit Yumiko's screams to all the people in the island before killing her.
• Attacked Toshinori Oda while he was trying to run away from him by shooting him in the chest, only for him to reveal that he was using a bullet-prove vest, causing Kazuo to kill him with a katana and cut off his head so he could use it to throw a grenade at Shuya, Noriko, and Shogo.
• Nearly killed Shuya by shooting him multiple times, and only didn't because Hiroki Sugimura saved him.
• Shot Mitsuko Souma to death during their fight, although she did somewhat deserve it given all the people she killed for fun and was nearly just as horrible as Kazuo was.
• Killed a group of hackers who were trying to end the game before they could do it.
  • Worse yet, if it wasn't for his senseless sadism, there would've been far more students who survived at the end of the game as the hacker group could ram the whole truck of explosives at the school, killing both Kitano and the troops stationed there, thus ending the game.
• After getting blinded by an explosion, Kazuo tried to kill Shogo by shooting him, and while Shogo kills him, the wounds from the fight would cause him to die the next day.
• Despite the high heinous standards of Battle Royale, Kazuo stands out due to having the highest kill count out of any player in Battle Royale, and having far lower rescourses than Kitano, who has control over the entire island and an entire military unit under his control.

Trivia[]

• Only the Live-Action version of Kazuo qualifies, as despite being more heinous in the manga and novel, those versions have a tragic backstory of which Kazuo was a genuinely good person before a car accident happened and killed his mother, while also causing him to have injuries that removed his empathy, which gives him moral agency issues as well. However, his backstory is never mentioned in the film, thus he qualifies as Pure Evil in this version.
• He is one of the two Battle Royale villains to be Pure Evil, alongside Yonemi Kamon. He is also the only Pure Evil to come from the film duology.

External Links[]

• Kazuo Kiriyama on the Villains Wiki.