Koreyoshi Kitamura

No detailed physical description is given. Kitamura is portrayed as a veteran senior officer of the police bureaucracy; he appears in the manga and anime, while the pair of 2006 live-action films present him as a police commissioner.

The supplementary How to Read volume frames Kitamura as no real villain, despite his evident shortcomings. A creature of hierarchy and protocol, he leans on the demands of confidentiality even when doing so strains those close to him, yet he defends his family and is ready to resist orders he finds wrong, even if compliance is forced on him in the end.

Suspicion first touches Kitamura when FBI agent Raye Penber probes both his household and the Yagamis over a possible information leak to Kira. Penber is then killed by Kira, and L renews the same scrutiny on the two families: Mogi, masquerading as L, calls on Kitamura's daughter to hint that she might be Kira, while the detective himself sizes up the genuine suspect, Light Yagami. Incensed at how his daughter has been handled, Kitamura demands answers from Soichiro and bristles at the wall of secrecy, though Soichiro does concede that his own son is the one truly under suspicion.

Kitamura later gets Soichiro clear of the Sakura TV premises once he has grabbed the deadly Kira tapes the station was airing, sending in a riot unit equipped with buses, shields, and full-face helmets to bring him out unharmed. When politicians, menaced by Kira and paid off by the Yotsuba Group that Kira now serves, force the case to close, Kitamura admits he fought the decision but was left no real option, while telling the public the hunt goes on. He extends Soichiro a choice: keep chasing Kira alongside ordinary police work, provided every link to L is broken. Soichiro and several teammates instead walk away from the force to stay with L, and they ultimately drag Yotsuba's tie to Kira into the light. Come Part II, Soichiro occupies the Deputy Director chair, with no word on what became of Kitamura.