Masashi Karaguchi was a 19-year-old chemistry student when he realized the power of controlling food and water. During the aftermath of the 2074 Kyotango Nuclear Plant Incident, which left most of the island without electricity for several weeks, Masashi decided to return to his father’s house in rural Kansai. There, he learned that the neighbors would form a line in front of his father’s house to ask him permission to use his water pump, the only one remaining in the area that did not require electrical power. Masashi quickly began operating the pump himself and charging people for his services. At first, his father opposed this practice, but Masahi insisted that they should control the water supply rigidly to ensure nobody was wasting the precious resource.

Regarding payment, Masashi argued that every neighbor used to have a water pump like the one they had and that it had been their mistake not to hold on to tradition, so they should pay the Karaguchi household for their work and their water. Although his father felt guilty about not sharing their resources with their neighbors as magnanimously as he’d like, he thought his son made a good point and decided to accept these new terms and conditions. After a few days, the neighbors started to complain about Masashi’s opportunism. Masashi then contacted local Yakuza members and offered them preferential access to the pump and a share of the profits if they ensured nobody interfered with his business scheme. After a few weeks, the electricity returned, but the small fortune and the criminal connections Masashi had made remained. He returned to Osaka to finish his chemistry major, specialized in water purification processes and studied another course on synthetic meats and meat cultivation on the side. Then, he took the small fortune he had made and founded his company.

Masashi had developed a cheap process for purifying water which produced barely acceptable results. The low cost of his products allowed him to be highly profitable, disregarding their low quality, and he soon expanded his company to the rest of Japan and neighboring Asian countries. The Japanese economy depended so much on the KC’s products that Masashi quickly began to have substantial input in Japanese domestic political life. This influence expanded to other Asian countries that started depending on KC products, and the company is currently working on extending its global reach.

Now, Masashi is a 57-year-old man, thin and bespectacled. Despite being one of the wealthiest humans in the world, he dresses austerely and does not appear to have much taste for luxury. He has graying hair and does not attempt dying it. He wears business suits when he is in an official capacity and short-sleeved shirts whenever he gets time off. He has a profound love for his country, which has evolved into quite extreme nationalist views. His drive to produce viable food was for Japan to recover economically, and he is proud of the result his actions have had. He is also content with the fact that the food produced by his company is responsible for a big part of the population recovery of the world. In his opinion, the harmful side-effects of his lesser quality products are acceptable collateral damage, given his plans and previous merits. He also believes that administering valuable resources is a task only a select group of people can perform efficiently. In his mind, people like him (male, Japanese, business people) are the only ones who should be making these decisions.

Although Mashashi is unpretentious regarding his looks and hasn’t had any plastic surgery, he has dental implants. Once, while exiting KC Headquarters, a protestor threw a rock at him and fractured his jaw. Masashi decided to replace all his teeth with titanium implants to show he could not be broken. The protestor, however, went missing.

Masashi has a son in his early 20s, Ichiro, with whom he is deeply disappointed. After leaving for college, Ichiro began experimenting with pleasurable NFTs and recreational drugs. Ichiro is more interested in enjoying himself than learning to run his father’s company. Some rumors indicate that Ichiro believes his father’s business is responsible for much human suffering. This idea has made him depressed and caused him to antagonize his father to some extent. Masashi has been seen slapping his son publicly, although he doesn’t allow anybody else to mistreat him. Ichiro’s mother committed suicide when he was a child. The motives of the suicide remain unknown, although it is known that Masashi started being more demanding of his son after her death. Ichiro seems to have never fully recovered from his mother’s suicide.

Masashi has strong reservations about using his company’s technology and resources to advance human cloning. He has publicly stated that he sees cloning as an irresponsible activity contrary to what he believes is the greater good. Some sources have implied that sharing technology with other corporations would be necessary to advance human cloning, which is definitely against what Masashi Karaguchi stands for.