Excited to return as the English voice of Osamu Kashiwagi in the upcoming Yakuza 0 Director’s Cut, David Hayter revealed his strange connection to the franchise. While working as a print model in Osaka in 1987 (roughly a year before the events of Yakuza 0), Hayter used to frequent a popular club called Maharaja. The club franchise would go on to inspire the fictional Maharaja clubs found in Yakuza 0.
According to Hayter, he and his friends used to frequent Maharaja, as the staff would serve free food to foreign models. There are two Maharaja clubs in Yakuza 0: one in Kamurocho (a fictional version of Kabukicho, Tokyo’s red-light district) and another in Sotenbori (a fictional version of the Dotonbori district in Osaka).
While the fictional Maharaja Hayter refers to in his social media post is likely the Kamurocho branch (Yakuza 0 starts you in this location as Kazuma Kiryu), the real-life branch he used to frequent might have been the Maharaja club in Minamisemba, Osaka. Sadly, the Minamisemba branch is much smaller compared to its Yakuza 0 counterpart and doesn’t boast a giant golden elephant at its entrance.
Despite the in-game Maharaja clubs closing down due to the waning interest in disco, there are still a few discos open in real-world Japan. You won’t find any weird mini-games in those clubs, however, so you might want to visit the Yakuza 0 discos instead.
Yakuza 0 is available on PlayStation 3 and 4, Windows, and Xbox One. An updated version titled Yakuza 0 Director’s Cut will feature new cutscenes, English voiceovers, French, Italian, German, and Spanish subtitles, and an online Red Light Raid multiplayer mode where you and friends choose from 60 iconic characters to take down hordes of enemies. Yakuza 0 Director’s Cut will be released as a timed exclusive for the Nintendo Switch 2 on June 5, 2025.
