Yotsuba Group

Eight ranking executives of the Yotsuba Corporation make up the group, brought together by Kyosuke Higuchi after he takes on the role of the latest Kira. Their pact does not outlast the case. Following L's death, Light Yagami writes out the names of the six surviving members, felling them with heart attacks, and the wave of suspicion that Kira lies behind the deaths sends the company's share price into a steep slide.

The group's grim ritual is the so-called Meetings of Death, a standing Friday gathering on the nineteenth floor of Yotsuba's headquarters where the executives settled on targets for Higuchi to remove, favoring anyone obstructing the company's rise. One such session was secretly observed by Touta Matsuda, then operating under the alias Taro Matsui as Misa Amane's manager.

Higuchi, the third person to take up the Kira name, received his Death Note from the shinigami Rem. While L probed the group, Higuchi struck down Hatori over a reckless slip of the tongue. His undoing comes through Rem, who exposes his identity to Misa Amane; she leans on her own standing as the second Kira to coax a taped confession out of him. An intricate trap laid jointly by Light and L closes around Higuchi, and the moment Light lays a hand on the notebook and his memories as the original Kira come flooding back, he uses a torn fragment of a Death Note to finish him.

Higuchi anchors the group as its Kira, painted in Death Note 13: How to Read as a grasping, pushy, self-serving man who reaches for power beyond his station through the notebook. Around him sit seven others. Shingo Mido, vice president of corporate strategy and finance director, harbors doubts and weighs walking away. Reiji Namikawa, the sales chief and reckoned the most gifted of the board, backs the killings at first but pulls out and merely watches after a phone call from Light; a professional-grade shogi player, he has no patience for useless subordinates.

The rest round out the roster of conspirators. Eiichi Takahashi, over material planning and Yotsuba Homes, is dismissed by his peers as a foolish seat-filler chosen to flatter Higuchi. Suguru Shimura, head of personnel, earns his place through paranoid attention to detail. Masahiko Kida, vice president of rights and planning, minds the group's money and panics when the hired investigator Eraldo Coil, secretly L, demands more of it. Takeshi Ooi of VT Enterprises is the eldest and most commanding, the one who seems to steer the meetings, while Arayoshi Hatori, the marketing VP and the president's illegitimate son, proves too lightweight for the pressure and is killed by Higuchi once his loose tongue makes him a liability.