Background

[totallysane]

Mikado’s history started out as a fairly typical story: a small-town boy growing up with his parents, in a place that seemed perfectly big and adventurous enough to him as a child. He didn’t lack anything in particular, and he had a best friend in elementary school he was very close to. He didn’t travel - not even for school trips - and he thought that he would live out his life content in his hometown. That is, until the day he looked around himself and realized that there wasn’t anything there for him to explore anymore. His best friend Masaomi had moved away by this point, and Mikado found himself lonely and bored.

The next part of the story wasn’t that strange either. Acquiring a computer and discovering the vast wide world of the internet, Mikado took part in chat groups and expanded his horizons via the information available there. He also kept in touch with Masaomi through chatting, so that it seemed as if he hadn’t lost his best friend after all. As he heard more about Masaomi’s life in the big city - even though he would later find out a lot of details had been omitted - he romanticized what living there would be like.

It was this romanticization of events elsewhere that caused Mikado’s story to take a rather uncommon turn. While he was in middle school, he and a group of online friends started to become interested in stories and rumors surrounding gangs in the area of Ikebukuro, the same place where his best friend lived. The little group decided to start their own rumor about a gang called the Dollars. The name of the entirely fictional group was a play on words related to “being lazy” or “doing nothing”, and meant to be nothing but a joke, a little experiment to see how far the rumor would go. When, however, the “dollars” rumor became more and more popular, Mikado and his little group of online friends took it one step further: creating a Dollars website and sending around a password to sign up for the organization.

The Dollars took off, despite having begun as a joke, and eventually Mikado’s fellow founders cut ties with both the group and Mikado himself, disappearing into the vastness of the internet without a trace. Since he didn’t have their real life information, Mikado had no way to re-establish contact, and he was left the sole founding member of an organization that existed mostly in a place he had never been. Until, that is, his best friend talked him into heading to Ikebukuro himself to attend high school.

Even though Mikado had heard stories about Ikebukuro and seen it on television and in other media, he didn’t have a full understanding for the nature of the city until he arrived there, moving into his own apartment and getting ready to begin his high school career. He was immediately overwhelmed by the crowds and the violence of the place, his ears filled with Masaomi’s warnings about people and places that could be dangerous. His best friend’s advice to him was just to live a normal life and not come into contact with any unsavory elements, but of course for Mikado that was impossible, as he would soon learn.

Mikado would find himself living two different lives: an everyday high school existence where he spent time with his best friend Masaomi and a girl named Anri who was his fellow class representative... and his involvement with the Dollars, which he was brought deeper into as he learned more about what his online prank had manifested in the real world. Ikebukuro’s underworld proved to be full of interesting people - not all of them human! - and one by one, Mikado became acquainted with a courier who was really a headless fairie, an information broker who had actually known him online for quite some time, an exceptionally strong debt collector, and other fellow Dollars members who each had their own motivations and goals.

Mikado’s first actual attempt to mobilize the Dollars for his own purposes happened when he found out about a situation involving human experimentation and the company Yagiri Pharmaceuticals. Though his information about the situation turned out to be incomplete, he met with an executive from that company in hopes of finding justice for a young girl who seemed to have been killed and then had her body used as a host for the head of the Headless Rider, who was in fact seeking her lost head. Mikado, after meeting both the girl and the Headless Rider, as well as others acquainted with the situation, made his move with the expectation of being backed up by the Dollars he summoned by text message.

The resulting “meeting” showed him just how many people had come to call themselves Dollars, but didn’t end in the conclusion he had hoped with the Pharmaceutical company. In the end, the head was still in their possession, the girl - who had after all only had plastic surgery at her own request for her own reasons - was allowed to go free, and Mikado himself was left with as many questions as answers about what to do with his “colorless and invisible” organization, as well as how to move forward with his life.

This wouldn’t, however, be the only time that Mikado tried to exert some modicum of control as the founder of the Dollars. Rather than simply settling down after this first incident, life in Ikebukuro continued to become more exciting, with a full-on gang war brewing and many individuals falling prey to a “Slasher” who was accused of being on every possible side by the others. What Mikado wanted was to make the Dollars a positive force in the world rather than a negative one, and if that couldn’t happen, to take them out of existence entirely. But when shutting down the discussion board and declaring the group disbanded did nothing to calm the wave of violence sweeping the city, he once again plunged into the underground world instead.

It turned out that Mikado’s two lives weren’t as separate as he’d thought though. While he was being concerned that his friends might get dragged into the violent situation because of him, his two closest friends had been feeling the same thing. He didn’t find out the full details at the time, but during the fight against the Dollar’s rival Yellow Scarves, he saw his friend Anri wielding a katana and his friend Masaomi wearing a Yellow Scarf himself. The three didn’t get a chance to talk about these revelations at the time, as Masaomi was seriously injured and soon after left town for his own reasons.

Masaomi’s departure left a hole in Mikado’s life, and while he and Anri continued to spend time together and grow closer, they decided to neither declare their relationship as something more than friendly nor talk about their secrets until Masaomi had returned to join them again. In the meantime, Mikado continued to try to find his place in Ikebukuro and in the Dollars, and got dragged into more dangerous situations as the Dollars continued to evolve. While the Yellow Scarves had become less of a threat in the aftermath of the original fight with them, there were many other figures in the Ikebukuro underworld who posed threats. Mikado’s loyalty to people like Celty Sturluson - the Headless Rider - and other Dollars members caused him to both be in dangerous situations and be rescued from them repeatedly.

It was the being rescued part that would eventually become a catalyst for change. After meeting a younger student at his high school who knew that Mikado was not just a member but also the founder of the Dollars, Mikado found himself in a situation where he was given a chance to create some real control within his organization. His kohai Aoba wasn’t just a Dollar, he was also the leader of Blue Square, a gang which had once been rivals of the Yellow Scarves, then later infiltrated them, and finally hidden under the Dollars umbrella. Blue Square was wreaking havoc in the name of the Dollars, and Mikado didn’t like or approve of their actions, so when they tried to forge a deal with him as founder of the Dollars, he didn’t immediately accept. It wasn’t until other factors forced his hand that he came to a decision.

Included in these factors were actions of Dollars members during a fight against a motorcycle gang from another area who had come into town to seek a bounty on Celty. The infamous “Headless Rider” or “Black Motorbike” wasn’t just a part of the Dollars, she was a personal friend to many, and thus an attack against her affected many others as well. When Dollars members acting on their own - and eventually revealed to be Aoba and Blue Square - took the fight back to the other gang’s turf, serious repercussions fell on even Dollars members who had been completely uninvolved with the matter. Anyone who was for any reason suspected of being involved with Dollars found themselves under attack, and somewhere along the way, it was suggested that kidnapping the girlfriend of the rival gang’s leader would be a way to stop the attacks.

This went against the values of not just Mikado but many other members, and at least one high-profile member of the Dollars wound up leaving because of it. In the meantime, it created a situation where the Dollars members were fighting each other over the kidnapped girl (and her friends who had been taken hostage as well) and Mikado tried to take responsibility for the actions of his organization.

Of course, it didn’t get him anywhere. He didn’t have any real experience in fighting, and there was no reason for anyone to listen to him, with the lack of structure within the Dollars. All he earned for his trouble was a beating and having to be rescued by Anri, which left him feeling a mixture of helplessness, guilt, and anger. Along with these feelings, he was being given certain pushes by the information broker Izaya, both overtly and under false pretenses utilizing Masaomi’s online identity.

When Mikado came to Blue Square with a new offer, he didn’t come meekly. He required that Aoba face his wrath over his previous actions, and cooly stabbed the young man’s hand with a pen after bringing him over as if he wanted him to sign a contract. This calculated act of violence was a turning point for Mikado, and this meeting marked the beginning of what would become an attempt to purge the Dollars of the darker elements within the gang. Once the agreement was made, he bandaged Aoba’s hand, sliding back into the nicer personality people were used to seeing from him.

After this point, Mikado stopped going into the chat room where he usually spoke with his friends, distancing himself somewhat to focus on his goals. When Anri spoke to him at school, he seemed to have regained some of the vitality he had lost when Kida disappeared, and it caused Anri to worry about what he was doing. It turned out she had valid reason to worry, since what Mikado was doing was going around with Aoba and the Blue Squares and forcibly ejecting people who used the Dollars name to commit crimes out of the organization.

His plan as he told Anri as they parted on the last day of the school year, was to create a space where she could live happily, as well as a place for Masaomi to return to.

Later, when shown talking to Aoba, Mikado was seen to quickly say that certain people should be ejected from Dollars.One of the people he spoke of ejecting was a fanatic that was supposedly stalking the idol Hijiribe Ruri.

During another conversation with a Dollars member he respected - Kadota - Mikado was shown saying that as long as there were still good people like Kadota and Celty in the organization, the organization itself could be good.

His goal to cleanse the Dollars led him to getting involved in the situation with Ruri’s stalker, Adabashi, who was in fact a member of Dollars. Mikado’s direct response to the situation became inevitable when Adabashi decided to strike at Celty, after it’s known that Shizuo’s younger brother Kasuka (who is in a relationship with Ruri) took Kasuka to Celty and Shinra’s apartment. Anri was also present during the meeting at the apartment, making her a potential target as well.

The easiest way to strike at Celty - who as a Dullahan was not physically vulnerable - was of course to attack Shinra, who was a mere human with no particularly amazing defenses. After this incident, which left Shinra nearly dead, a number of different individuals were following Adabashi for their own reasons. Meanwhile, Mikado’s friends who were concerned with his recent behavior tried to discover what he was doing behind everyone’s backs.

The situation came to a head in a showdown after false information about Ruri’s whereabouts lured Adabashi into a trap. There were a number of different people who converged on the same place for various reasons that were only tangentially related, and the fight wound up turning into a complicated mess because of this. Mikado himself wound up targeted by Adabashi, having his head slammed into a wall repeatedly until his goggles broke and blood leaked out of his mask. His life was saved by Masaomi, who had intervened in the fight after stumbling upon it while trying to find out about Mikado’s actions and Blue Square.

Even though Masaomi managed to save Mikado’s life, he himself was pinned down by Adabashi, and it was Mikado’s turn to take over the fight again. Despite crawling across the ground injured, he poured lighter fluid on the stalker and calmly set him on fire, causing him to run away. After this moment, there was a confrontation between the two friends, since Masaomi had up until seeing his face thought the boy he was seeing before him was Aoba, not Mikado.

During the confrontation, however, Mikado simply asked his friend to wait a little longer to meet with him, and told him that he was going to create a place that both Masaomi and Anri could come back to. He smiled and laughed despite having serious injuries, and left with Aoba and Blue Square.