Byakuya Togami

Byakuya Togami

Byakuya Togami is the heir to the worldwide financial conglomerate that is the Togami family. The Togami family has a "peculiar inheritance system", in which the male head of the family does not take a wife, but instead couples with exceptional women from around the world, in order to bear as many children as possible. As such, Byakuya had fifteen half-siblings, all potential heirs to the Togami family and fortune. Byakuya and his siblings were forced to battle against one another to become the next head of the family, and Byakuya was the last one standing, the first time in the history of the Togami family that the youngest male had won. The siblings who lost the battle were exiled from the family, considered "unfit for the name of Togami", and given a commoner life. Byakuya akins it to being killed, because being exiled is like death.After winning the battle, Byakuya became the chosen heir apparent to the Togami family. Despite the Togami Corporation's significant reach and power (being, as he told Makoto in Chapter 2, a member of the Council of Global Controllers, a secret council which rules the world from the shadows), Togami aimed to take the Corporation to even greater heights. He began managing business operations within the family, and gained access to vast financial assets, investing his portion into day trading - selling stocks, shares and assets. Through this, he managed to amass a personal wealth of over four billion dollars, despite his young age. Within the family, the closest person to Byakuya was his butler, named Aloysius Pennyworth, who referred to Byakuya as "Young Master".Byakuya attended Green Hills High School and was later scouted by Hope's Peak Academy as part of Class 78th as the Ultimate Affluent Progeny.

Byakuya is 185cm (6’1”) and weighs around 68kg, with a tall, slender build and strikingly long legs. He has pale skin, lapis blue eyes with noticeably long eyelashes, and has chin-length blonde canary yellow hair. He wears a black suit jacket over a white shirt and lapis blue crossover tie. He also wears black dress pants accessorized with a black belt, and black dress shoes with a slight heel. He has a silver pocket watch in his suit breast pocket and had the pin of his former high-school on his lapel.

Byakuya is a cold and self-centered person who is very reserved. He is not interested in co-operating with others due to his own sense of self-superiority, and his opinion that others are, on the whole, lesser than him. This sense of superiority and black-and-white worldview comes as a result of his upbringing; Byakuya had to prove his worth in battle against his siblings in order to earn his role in the family as heir-apparent, whereas all his other siblings who lost the battle were effectively ex-communicated from the family and cut off financially, deemed "unfit for the name of Togami". Because Byakuya was raised in such a highly competitive environment of "haves" and "have-nots", he thinks all people only think about themselves and he dismisses emotional ties as petty and unimportant, in his own words: "You're not about to claim she wouldn't kill a close friend, are you? You still don't get it, do you? The game we're playing here isn't so kind. Honeyed words like friendship don't matter here. What matters is outwitting the opponent, defeating them... Not a person alive would sacrifice themselves for another. In the end, we're all in it for ourselves." Due to his lack of emotional ties with the other students, Byakuya was able to emotionally distance himself from the horrors of the Killing School Life, and thus proved to be one of the most competent and insightful investigators in the group due to his high level of intelligence. His compulsive competitiveness caused him to treat the Killing School Life as simply a game, and one he fully intended to win, just as he had won his battle to become the head of the Togami family - much to the disgust of the other students. An extreme example of this occured after the death of Chihiro Fujisaki, where he posed Chihiro's corpse to frame Toko Fukawa and "make things more interesting", and perceiving the dead body of Chihiro as simply "an object".

Ultimate Affluent Progeny, Byakuya's talent offered him a range of different skills. He is incredibly intelligent, as he was the first one to deduce that one of the group members had been betrayed. He also beat out all of his siblings and ran multiple branches of the Togami Empire, as well as acquiring a massive fortune for himself.