Kazutora is so justice oriented it's actually insane and I can yap about it for hours. Like it borders on genuine vengeance, and during his time as an antagonist, Kazutora is genuinely vindictive.
He's hyperfocused on the idea of getting revenge on Mikey out of a very strong, twisted sense of personal justice to prove himself to be right all the time, which makes his mindset inflexible and fragile towards criticism.
He never wants to view himself as "in the wrong," so he blames Mikey for Shinichirou's death to correct that perceived "wrong" instead. He cannot for the love of God accept responsibility, because if he did, then that means that he would have to acknowledge that he did a bad thing, which is something that he doesn't want to do because of the way he thinks in extremes.
To put it simply, Kazutora thinks in black and white. It's a survival tactic to protect himself, and canonically he emulates this pattern of behavior from his parents as a coping mechanism since he was never given the choice. (ie, the whole line of "are you on your dad's side?, or my side. You can't choose both. You have to choose one" that his mother says.) This is shown in other ways too, (like his whole interaction with Draken where he refuses to believe that Draken is his friend, and doesn't want to accept a compromise,) but the point is: if he accepts that he made a wrong decision that hurt someone, then he automatically correlates that indiscriminately to being an evil person. He doesn't want to be the villain in his own narrative. He wants to be the hero.
The thing about Kazutora is that he also seems to believe in this "strong-arm" kind of morality, where whoever could physically dominate the situation would therefore be in the right since nobody else has the power to challenge them; which is, again, something that he seems to have gotten from his upbringing, but specifically the way he was physically abused as a child and had no power in his situation.
Much of his arc essentially revolves around how far he's willing to go to justify his line of thinking, even if it doesn't make any logical sense, and this is what I believe to be the point of his, tbh, really confusing monologue, where he says:
"Of course you're my enemy! I will eliminate everyone in my way. Did you know, Mikey? If you kill people, that makes you evil. But... if you kill bad guys, that makes you a hero! [...] to become a hero, I'm gonna kill the bad guy."
Because in the end, it's not really about what he's specifically saying as opposed to what he's doing; and what he's doing is ostensibly the same as jumping through five million mental hula hoops, because he would rather do that than accept that he was in the wrong.
He also weaponizes this line of thinking to fight underhandedly; to break his subordinates' bones; to take his anger out on people, because to him: if he views what he's doing as a self-righteous return to form, the ends will always justify the means.
However, when he survives past the Valhalla arc, and we see him again in the future, he's still oriented around the idea of justice, but it's reoriented so that he's helping to save Toman and trying to find Mikey instead of hurting people. Mikey doesn't have to forgive him, but he wants to make up for what he's done, and it's sad that it's not until after Baji is dead that Kazutora fully repents and swears to take the burden of Shinichirou & Baji's deaths onto his shoulders for the rest of his life.
His arc is essentially about his acceptance of the way he's been hurting people, even after being in denial for so long, and I love how beautiful the message of his story is.
In the future, I love how Kazutora's sense of justice evolves and matures. He's still rooted in the idea of it, but instead of being utilized to justify his own actions and killing Mikey, (in the English dub characterization) it's more focused on repaying the debt that he owes to Mikey for saving him (not just for him sparing Kazutora at Valhalla, but also I believe to be in reference to Mikey defending him from Black Dragon and when Kazutora first truly felt accepted).
I think in the context of his monologue about heroism, it's interesting that he does end up becoming a heroic person, but under a redeemed definition because he's no longer serving himself. He saves other people. He saves Takemichi (someone he doesn't even like) from being killed by Kisaki when he wanted to save Chifuyu. He saves a woman getting beat up on the street. He wants to save Mikey from the clutches of a corrupted environment entrenched in violence.
I could go more into detail about how Kazutora's arc about wanting to find and talk to Mikey goes entirely unresolved, as well as how so many of his fundamental goals as a character inherently center Mikey specifically to the point that it borders on obsession, but I'll probably save that for a future yap post lmao because this getting entirely too long.
Ummm for that tldr, Wakui lowkey shelved Kazutora after the Valhalla arc when there could have been more interesting things done with his character, especially in regards to Mikey and when he does meet him in the Manila arc which ends up in his death but that's never shown; ummm additionally just like how I personally believe that Kazutora didn't really have any further plans after achieving the hypothetical goal of killing Mikey, I also believe that he doesn't really have any goals after meeting with Mikey in the future; ummm, also Kazutora is a mirror to many of Mikey's qualities that makes him good at communicating and connecting with his loved ones, and Kazutora was written to function as a very personal antagonist to Mikey since he cannot be communicated with in any feasible sense blah blah blah.
TLDR; I just have a lot of thoughts on Kazutora (specifically in regards to his relationship with Mikey) that are way too many in number to write down on a singular post lmao.
