Tag: 1990s

Sasori in U.S.A. (Daisuke Goto, 1997)

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An attempt to reboot the Female Prisoner Scorpion series for V-cinema had stalled in the early ‘90s when the then star of Death Threat abruptly pulled out of a sequel that was to be a production with Hong Kong’s Golden Harvest. In 1997, however, Nami Matsushima was once again resurrected only this time as a US co-production with most of the film shot in Los Angeles and in a mix of Japanese and English. 

Relocating the franchise overseas is in some ways surprising given that the first film of the original series opened with the national anthem and shots of the Japanese flag. It was explicitly clear that they were talking primarily about the social conditions of Japan in the 1970s. Likewise, Sasori in U.S.A. seems to walk back on some of the themes of patriarchal oppression that informed the previous instalments preferring instead to refocus on themes such as racism, the failure of the American Dream, and the powerlessness of living under a cruel and arbitrary foreign power, which is an entirely contrary perspective to the earlier film’s attempts at critiquing corruption with Japan itself. 

It’s never really made clear why Jiro (Tetta Sugimoto) and Nami (Yoko Saito) are in the US in the first place, though Nami’s sympathetic journalist friend implies that Jiro came there to make his fortune only to become frustrated with the limits of the American Dream. This Nami is a well-paid interior designer, at least according to her prison file, if one completely in thrall to Jiro whom she met in the US an unspecified amount of time previously. When Jiro is killed by a car bomb, Nami ends up being arrested for his murder because she stood to gain 1.2 million dollars by his death (though they appeared to have a very comfortable life to begin with, so it’s not clear why she’d take such drastic action). Apparently too traumatised to defend herself, Nami failed to hire a proper lawyer or fight her case and has not launched an appeal but spends all her time vowing revenge, which of course means she has to escape from prison. 

That might be a minor problem for the film, which is to some extent in its marketing selling itself as a women in prison picture. This is indeed the most exploitative of the films so far with a salacious shower scene and titivating moments of touching and kissing each other, while Nami is also harassed by an obnoxious blonde prisoner who seems to be running the cell block while in cahoots with the sadistic warden who, as this is America, is incredibly religious and forever quoting from the Bible while raping his inmates. Nami eventually stabs him in the eye in what may be an homage to the original series. 

Nevertheless, Nami soon escapes in the company of another prisoner who is second generation Japanese-American and has been blind since birth. Like Nami, Yukiko (Shizuka Ochi) also has a mission of revenge against the American hoodlums who raped her and shot her Dominican boyfriend Dino to death. Though the narrative actually has almost nothing to do with Female Prisoner Scorpion, the twist will be very obvious to anyone familiar with the series as Nami has indeed been betrayed by a man she thought loved her. Discovering Jiro may have been embezzling money and in fact knocking off the lawyers who tried to sue the car company he worked for for making defective cars rather than being knocked off by them, Nami is forced to reckon with the illusionary quality of her American success story. Jiro meanwhile rails about entrenched racism and unfairness, decrying the police and justice system as “insane” which they well might be or at least in their treatment of Nami. Broken by the failure of his American Dream, he becomes a pitiful and tragic figure.

Even so, Nami’s revenge remains a personal affair rather than an all out attack on a corrupt and oppressive social order ruled by misogyny and male failure. Though the production values are perhaps a little higher than one might expect and the direction leaning towards the artier side with its blue-tinted eroticism, shower scenes aside, the film remains very much of its time and has very little in common with the Female Prisoner Scorpion franchise save its women in prison elements and a late allusion to an actual scorpion. It is though interesting for its perspective on the American Dream and America in general as a place of greed, violence, and intensely hypocritical religious fanaticism. 

Minbo, or the Gentle Art of Japanese Extortion (ミンボーの女, Juzo Itami, 1992)

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“Yakuza are vain, treat them politely,” the heroine of Juzo Itami’s 1992 comedy Minbo, or The Gentle Art of Japanese Extortion (ミンボーの女, Minbo no Onna) instructs a hapless pair of hotel employees trying to solve the organised crime problem at their hotel, but it’s a lesson Itami would go on to learn himself after he was attacked by gangsters who slashed his face and neck with knives. Itami in fact died in fairly suspicious circumstances in 1997 having fallen from the roof of a high-rise building leaving a note behind him explaining his “suicide” was intended to prove his innocence in regards to an upcoming newspaper story alleging an affair with a young actress. Given Itami’s films had often made a point of skewering Japanese traditions and that taking one’s own life is not the way most would choose to clear their name, it has long been suggested that his death was staged by yakuza who’d continued to harass him ever since the film’s release. 

It’s true enough that Minbo may have touched a nerve in undercutting the yakuza’s preferred image of themselves as the inheritors of samurai valour standing up for the oppressed masses against a cruel authority. Of course, that isn’t really how it works and getting the yakuza on your side in a civil dispute may be a case of out of the frying pan into the fire. It’s the yakuza themselves who are the oppressive authority ruling by fear and intimidation. Even so, the yakuza as an institution were in a moment of flux in the early ‘90s following the collapse of the bubble economy during which they’d shifted further away from the street thuggery of the post-war era into a newly corporatised if no more respectable occupation. This change is perhaps exemplified by “minbo”, a kind of fraud in which gangsters get involved in civil disputes underpinned with the thinly veiled threat of violence. 

The yakuza who plague the Hotel Europa, for example, pull petty tricks such as “discovering” a cooked cockroach in the middle of a lasagne, or claiming to have left a bag of cash behind which is later handed back to the “wrong” person by the front desk who probably should have asked for ID. Itami frames the presence of the yakuza as a kind of infestation, suggesting that if you do not tackle it right away it soon takes over and cannot be removed. Dealing with the problem directly may cause it to get worse in the short term, but only by doing so can you ever be rid of them once and for all. At least that’s the advice given by forthright attorney Mahiru (Nobuko Miyamoto) who demonstrated that the only way to deal with yakuza is to show them that you aren’t afraid because at the end of the day the law is on your side. 

Part of the “woman” cycle in which Itami’s wife Nobuko Miyamoto stars as a sometimes eccentric yet infinitely capable woman solving the problems of contemporary Japan through old-fashioned earnestness and everyday decency, Minbo finds its fearless heroine explaining that the yakuza themselves are a kind of con. In general they won’t hurt civilians because then they’re much more likely to be arrested. Going to prison is incredibly expensive and therefore not likely to prove cost effective. She knows that if she can catch them admitting they’ve committed a “crime” then they can’t touch her, and they won’t. They do however go after the rather more naive hotel boss Kobayashi (Akira Takarada) whom they try to frame for the rape of a bar hostess, drugging him after he unwisely agreed to meet them alone to hand over blackmail money. Then again, the hotel isn’t entirely whiter than white either. Kobayashi admits they can’t pull strings with the health ministry over the cockroach incident because they previously used them to cover up a previous instance of food poisoning. 

In any case, the yakuza end up looking very grubby indeed. It’s hard to call yourself a defender of the oppressed when you’re pulling petty stunts no better than a backstreet chancer. Yet like any kind of irritating insect, they too begin to evolve gradually developing a kind of immunity to Mahiru’s tactics in themselves manipulating law only they aren’t as good as she is and they are after all in the wrong. She’s a little a wrong too in that if pushed too far the yakuza will indeed stoop to physical violence against civilians, but she also knows that they thrive on fear and that to beat them she may have to put her safety on the line to prove they have no power over her. It seems Itami felt something similar issuing a statement shortly after his attack to the effect that “Yakuza must not be allowed to deprive us of our freedom through violence and intimidation, and this is the message of my movie”. As gently humorous as any of Itami’s movies and no less earnest, Minbo paints the yakuza as a plague on post-bubble Japan and suggests that it’s about time they were shown the door. 

Trailer (no subtitles)

Nang Nak (นางนาก, Nonzee Nimibutr, 1999)

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Mae Nak Phra Khanong is one of Thailand’s best known and most enduring ghost stories, though Nonzee Nimibutr’s 1999 adaptation Nang Nak (นางนาก) scales back a little on the inherent terror of the folktale, preferring to focus on the romantic tragedy of a loving couple separated by death. You could then read it as a tale of grief, that the husband returning from war cannot accept his wife is dead, rather than the reverse that the wife’s love and devotion is so strong that it overcomes death itself and becomes something that is in that way terrifying.

It does seem, however, that in this instance the ghost is real and it is vengeful. The wronged wife Nak (Inthira Charoenpura) takes revenge on those who betrayed her from the midwife who stole her wedding ring to a local man who tried to tell her husband, Mak (Winai Kraibutr), that his wife was actually dead. Though the framing of the tale may seem in its way uncomfortably sexist despite its romantic overtones, it’s clear that Nak suffered largely because of the male failure around her. Her husband was conscripted for a war which was really nothing to do with him leaving her, pregnant, to manage their farm alone. The implied cause of the miscarriage which leads to her death in childbirth is overwork and she appears to have received no help from the other villagers with many men apparently remaining in the village. When questioned by Mak, she tells him that the other villagers shunned her and called her an adulteress, disputing the parentage of her child with her husband already away at the war. 

But the film does not particularly blame war for Nak’s fate, seemingly accepting it as a necessary duty Mak had to further the cause of his nation which is placed above that he owes to his wife and unborn child. In fact, the ghost issue is later solved only by the intervention of a powerful Buddhist monk, Somdet, which implies that this supranational structure is necessary for maintaining order and that the village is otherwise unable to govern itself. Likewise, it paints Buddhism as a modern religion and essential means of national unity that is inherently superior to the backward superstitions of the villagers who decide to call in a shaman against the advice of the local monk. The shaman turns out to be next to useless and in fact makes things worse until Somdet can arrive and is able to talk peacefully to Nak and convince her that she needs to accept her death and move on to the next cycle of life.

It’s also Somdet who heals Mak of his otherwise fatal war wound and the intercutting of his fight for life with Nak’s during the violence of childbirth suggests that her life is somehow sacrificed for his further emphasising the depth and devotion of her love for him. When his health is recovered, Somdet recommends that Mak become a monk in order to clear out his bad karma but Mak declines explaining that he has a duty to his wife and child in his village and so must return to them. In this way, they become a kind of barrier to his spiritual destiny and emblematic of the attachments he should learn to cast off in order to avoid suffering. Like Nak, Mak’s own devotion extends beyond the grave for he does indeed become a monk and never remarries, keeping the promise to be reincarnated as Nak’s husband in a subsequent life.

The local priest had told Nak that scaring monks is a sin, which is odd in a way that it’s somehow worse to scare these spiritually powerful beings than the ordinary villagers. Nevertheless Nonzee Nimibutr gives her the somewhat familiar attributes of a Thai ghost, allowing her to hang from the ceiling with her hair flowing down while she stares at the monks with bloodshot eyes and a pale face. She is able to enchant Mak so that he does not notice the dilapidation of their home or that all their food is rotten even if he later becomes suspicious of the large number of rats around. Primarily she seems to use natural creatures to enact her revenge with the midwife’s corpse torn apart by lizards, though Mak too has terrifying nightmares of his friend dying in his arms and then melting away with quite sickening effects. Even so, it seems Nonzee Nimibutr is keener to emphasise the romantic tragedy and primacy of Buddhist thought rather than ghostly horror while making it clear that death, along with grief and loss, is something that must be accepted so the spiritual order may be maintained and with it order in the mortal realm.

Trailer (no dialogue)

Moonlight Whispers (月光の囁き, Akihiko Shiota, 1999)

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Well established in Japanese cinema, the teenage romance comes with its own series of genre tropes, the barriers standing between the young lovers usually leaning towards the constraints of a conformist society, class differences, or familial disapproval if not introducing a note of inevitable tragedy in serious illness or physical threat. What the youngsters typically do not do or are actively at times prevented from doing is to begin to accept themselves for all they know that to do so may in a sense result in their exile from mainstream society. Yet this is exactly the conclusion with which Akihito Shiota’s debut feature Moonlight Whispers (月光の囁き, Gekko no Sasayaki), adapted from the manga by Masahiko Kikuni, eventually presents us as the teens come to embrace their unconventional relationship while accepting that others may never truly understand. 

Beginning in conventionality, Shiota opens with the sweet and innocent friendship between kendo enthusiasts Takuya (Kenji Mizuhashi) and Satsuki (Tsugumi). Many seem to think they are a couple, but Takuya is quick to correct his friend telling him that they are merely “sparring partners” even going so far as to hand over a love letter, which he knows to be exactly the same as the letter his friend writes to all the other girls, on his behalf. As expected, Satsuki finds his behaviour insensitive, suspecting that Takuya himself has a crush on her but finally confessing her own feelings while he wheedles that he never said anything because of his sense of inadequacy explaining that just to be near her was always enough for him. Following this brief moment of connection, the couple embark on a “normal” teen romance, Satsuki taking the initiative with Takuya in bed with a cold to consummate their relationship. It does not go particularly well, in part because Takuya has a secret. He’s been secretly stalking Satsuki for ages, likes to break into her locker to smell her gym kit, and has a collection of keepsakes he’s stolen from her in addition to a series of illicit photographs and a tape of her using his family bathroom. The tape proves the last straw for Satsuki who then storms out calling him a freak and starts dating her handsome kendo club senior Uematsu (Kota Kusano) instead. 

What Satsuki hasn’t figured out is that Takuya quite likes it when she’s mean to him, which is why he continues stalking her even after she starts dating the very “normal” Uematsu. Unexpectedly, she begins to discover that she quite likes, if not quite the process of hurting him, then watching him suffer which is why she makes him sit silently in a tiny cupboard while she has “normal” sex with Uematsu on a sofa directly opposite. The relationship between them is one of push and pull, Takuya initially embarrassed and ashamed of his masochistic desires explaining that “god made me wrong” while ironically driving Satsuki towards an awareness of her sadism. On the other hand, the relationship had always been unconventional in its reversal of gender roles, Satsuki quite literally leading while Takuya trails behind. She is the first to openly state her feelings and the first to initiate sex, while Takuya is somewhat feminised in his deference and timidity.

Nevertheless, Satsuki struggles to accept her capacity for sadism refusing to tell Uematsu why she broke up with Takuya but explaining that she wants a “normal” relationship in with someone with whom she would be able to discuss anything and everything honestly the irony being that she might have had that with Takuya but cannot with Uematsu because she is filled with internalised shame about the “perverted” pleasure she gains on witnessing Takuya wilfully degrade himself on her behalf. They are already in an accidental sado-masochistic relationship though they of course do not quite have the words to describe how they feel or what it is that exists between them. Their love inevitably heads to quite a dark place but even so leads to a kind of rebirth in which each fully accepts themselves for who they are along with their designated role within the relationship even if also knowing that others may not be quite so understanding. 

For all of its provocative qualities, there is an underlying sweetness in Shiota’s unconventional romance even as he carefully inverts accepted genre norms the conventional indie background score perhaps ironically undercutting any sense that the relationship is actually as “perverse” as the teens sometimes feel it is even as they each struggle with their respective feelings and desires. Nevertheless he ends on a note of anxious ambivalence as the physically and emotionally wounded lovers remove themselves from mainstream society in order to embrace their authentic selves.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Helpless (ヘルプレス, Shinji Aoyama, 1996)

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A title card close to the beginning of Shinji Aoyama’s debut film Helpless (ヘルプレス) lets us know that this drama which spans a single day takes place on Sept. 10, 1989. It is indeed late summer for most of the protagonists, refugees from the Showa era living on borrowed time in Heisei and intensely resentful towards the contemporary society which appears to have no place for them while the glamour of the Bubble economy does not appear to have trickled down to their peaceful provincial existence. 

Yakuza, for example, are very much associated with the post-war past and one-armed foot soldier Yasuo (Ken Mitsuishi) is an old-school street thug who can’t accept that his former boss literally is as dead as the institution itself. He’s met at a train station by two former associates, but it’s clear the older at least is awkward around him finally telling Yasuo not to call “too often”. “It’s nice to be normal,” Yasuo sneers, realising his former comrade has gone straight and lives an ordinary life as a regular businessman which is why he really wants nothing to do with his yakuza past. Yasuo takes his as more than just a personal betrayal and shoots him dead with his own gun.

He is quite literally helpless, there’s no place for him in the contemporary society and his only hope is killing his old boss, who is already dead, so he can go back to prison. The only sticking point his younger sister Yuri (Kaori Tsuji) who has learning difficulties and had been living in residential care. Another of Yasuo’s former associates now longer a yakuza, Kenji (Tadanobu Asano), is similarly caring for his father who is in hospital for serious medical treatment. Kenji’s father hums the Internationale to himself and seems to have been consumed by the failure of his personal revolution muttering about blast furnaces while at home Kenji looks out on the now rusty aspirations of another “new era” in a moribund steel plant. He lies to his father that he has a received a job offer from there. 

The two men seem destined to collide, Kenji’s numbed resignation and Yasuo’s irrational rage, though it’s Kenji who later snaps after learning that his father has hanged himself while he was busy taking care of Yasuo’s sister. Even an old classmate he runs into is filled with resentment, talking about taking his “revenge” at the class reunion by poisoning the punch. He says he “forgives” Kenji because he once helped him find his PE kit, though Kenji claims he did it mostly for selfish reasons.The chef at the roadside diner where they wait for Yasuo also seems to be henpecked by his wife who calls him “weaker than a woman.” Kenji later says that he killed them because they ridiculed him, tipped over the edge by his own insecurity and sense of futility. 

Yasuo discovers something similar after being stopped at a roadblock, a policeman expressing sympathy that “they forgot about a punk like you.” Yasuo points the gun at his own head, discovering one last bullet, but it’s not quite clear what happens after that. Yasuo was a wandering ghost anyway, a man of the Showa era haunting the streets of Heisei with a mission to kill a man like himself already dead. On the severed arm Kenji later discovers in his bag, there’s a tattoo of a skull and the motto “help me” which might speak for them all desperately looking for some kind of way out but finding little support. 

But then again, Kenji proves unexpectedly kind caring for Yuri even while Yasuo selfishly considers a double suicide. Dressed in white though also in a T-shirt featuring the cover for Nirvana’s Nevermind which was released in 1991, Kenji is the light and Yasuo the dark despite their mutual violence one bound by nihilism and the other a strange positivity blithely searching for an escaped rabbit just as helpless as he himself may be. Filled with ironic whimsy the film takes place in a purgatorial space inhabited by those displaced by the Bubble who no longer have anything to pin their hopes on while living on borrowed time in a late summer rapidly drawing to a close. 

The Stairway to the Distant Past (遙かな時代の階段を, Kaizo Hayashi, 1995)

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If The Most Terrible Time in My Life was channeling Nikkatsu Noir, Stairway to the Distant Past (遙かな時代の階段を, Harukana Jidai no Kaidan wo) sees Hayashi channel Fukasaku for a full-on confrontation with the legacies of the post-war era just as PI Maiku (Masatoshi Nagase) is forced to confront and attempt to cure the corrupted legacies of his own origins all while trying to save the city of Yokohama from drifting off to “another hell.” This time shooting in colour, Hayashi conjures a sense of mythic dread in the purple haze that hangs over a hidden city and the eerie blue of the path to get there.

But before all that, Maiku has fallen on such hard times his beloved car’s been repossessed and he’s stuck finding lost dogs for wealthy yet eccentric clients. Meanwhile, leader of New Japs gang Kanno (Shiro Sano) is running for political office while two of his underlings decide to freelance in order to take over the lucrative river trade which no one, not even the Taiwanese gang otherwise apparently in the ascendent, has ever dared to touch in fear of the mythic “White Man” who’s controlled the area since the post-war era with a ruthless efficiency that has seen any man challenge him not live to tell the tale. In the midst of it all is bigoted, and apparently pretty corrupt, policeman Nakayama (Akaji Maro) who first blackmails Maiku into helping him investigate a theft and smuggling ring on the river then apparently makes a deal with the White Man’s underlings who in turn blackmail him over his gambling debts but also claim they can make him chief of police if he chooses to play along.

Nakayama is a symbol of the rot in the contemporary city though he is in fact merely spineless, greedy, unpleasant and prejudiced. He asks Maiku for help because he’s hamstrung by the rules of policing which prevent him from doing the nefarious things he asks Maiku to do all of which leads to some pretty tragic consequences and a pair of orphaned children. The New Japs are perhaps a sign of further corruption still to come as Kanno tries to go legit as a politician but only as a means of increasing his influence and earnings. 

The river becomes a kind of nexus, the shore line between contemporary Japan and the “distant past” of the post-war era. Nakayama discovers that no one is technically policing it because it’s outside of everyone’s jurisdiction, while the White Man seems to have been in a position of unassailed power for half a century. As he later says, he’s the only one “living in the past” and perhaps quite literally so as Maiku has to transcend a literal stairway while guided by some kind of local prophet in order to travel to his world and finally risk his life to confront him. At the same time, Maiku is threatened by his own point of origin in the unexpected return of his mother, a now middle-aged stripper known as Dynamite Sexy Lily (Haruko Wanibuchi), who abandoned him and his sister and when he was just a child. 

Her name, along Maiku’s own, are perhaps hangovers from the Occupation era now even more out of place in a changed Japan. Making full use of the colour palate, Hayashi repeatedly flashes back to a pair of Lily’s red shoes as if signalling the unreality of the hidden city and the superimposition of past and present. His flashbacks to the late 1940s echo the cinematography of Fukasaku’s jitsuroku epics with their frenetic chases through black markets, but towards the conclusion the canted angles make it through to our era too and most particularly in the White Man’s lair, a blue-tinged industrial labyrinth that recalls the post-apocalyptic visions of a city still in ruins.

“Yokohama’s changed a lot,” Lily is told on her return and in fact several times after that. She likes it a little better now, the White Man no so much complaining that this city no longer has a place for him as if foreseeing his own eclipse and the oncoming end of an era. But then again, perhaps only the names have changed. All we’re left with is new gangsters with no code, and the White Man did at least stick to the rules even if he did so with ruthless authority. As for Maiku, his passage to the underworld seems to have brought him new clarity. His outfit now a little more sophisticated and mature, less an affectation borne of watching too many movies than an expression of himself. Nevertheless, Yokohama remains a small-town city, a cosy place with a generally friendly and easy going population albeit one with darkness hovering around the edges.

The Stairway to the Distant Past screens 18th/19th October at Japan Society New York.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

The Most Terrible Time in My Life (我が人生最悪の時, Kaizo Hayashi, 1994)

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A Yokohama PI finds himself investigating a case of tragic brotherhood against the backdrop of a burgeoning gang war in Kaizo’s Hayashi’s retro crime movie The Most Terrible Time in my Life (我が人生最悪の時, Waga Jinsei Saiaku no Toki). In the first of three films featuring detective / cinema projectionist Maiku Hama (yes, that is his real name), Hayashi harks back to the Nikkatsu borderless action films of the 1960s along with classic noir while also exploring contemporary attitudes towards those not born in Japan. 

The force destabilising the local equilibrium is a gang that calls itself the “New Japs” and was founded by Zainichi Koreans who had acquired Japanese citizenship and now accepts members from other nations colonised by Japan who’ve also naturalised. The implication is that they’re agitating because the society still doesn’t fully accept them, something echoed by Maiku’s (Masatoshi Nagase) first client, a mister Kim, who says the police aren’t interested in his case because he’s a foreigner while when he actually encounters him Lieutenant Nakayama (Akaji Maro) does indeed make some quite prejudiced remarks. Hanging out in a mahjong parlour, Maiku comes to the aid of the waiter, Hai Ping (Yang Hai-Ping), newly arrived from Taiwan when he’s hassled by a racist customer noticing that the waiter’s actually carrying a knife under his shirt and might be about to ruin his life. 

Maiku loses a finger in the process (they sew it back on later), leaving Hai Ping to show up at his office with an improbably large amount of money Maiku refuses and then agrees to take when he hires him to find his brother De Jian (Hou Te-Chien) who came to Japan two years previously and has been missing ever since. Hai Ping’s relationship with De Jian speaks to Maiku because he’s also caring for his 16-year-old sister, their parents being absent from their lives just as Hai Ping and his brother were abandoned and then drifted into gang crime as a means of survival. He discovers that De Jian has married a Japanese woman of Chinese descent who like them was separated from her family which explains why she doesn’t speak any Chinese but was trotted out in a cheongsam as an exotic beauty when she was a sex worker which is how De Jian met her and got himself into trouble with gang when they ran away together. 

They are all in their way displaced people trying to get a foothold in Yokohama but finding varying degrees of success. A turf war is apparently about to break out between the Taiwanese and Hong Kong gangs, though we never actually see the one from Hong Kong only the New Japs and the Taiwanese who don’t actually fight but engage in vendettas with Hai Ping who is actually ordered to kill his own brother to prove his loyalty and atone for his crime. Maiku figures this out quite quickly and again tries to stop new his friend from making a huge mistake but not even he can prevent the fatalistic inevitability of the collision of all these competing honour codes and the implosion of a more literal kind of brotherhood in the face of that represented by the gang. 

Despite the film’s title, which in a meta touch flips around on the marquee of the cinema where Maiku has his office which is currently screening The Best Years of Our Lives, Maiku will have some far worse times in his life in subsequent films but the Yokohama we encounter here is a lived-in neighbourhood with its collection of quirky characters and strange goings on. The tone is humorous and ironic as Maiku’s friends have to chase a dog to get his finger back or Maiku’s taxi driver friend reads magazines while driving and changes hats in line with his role, but it has an underlying noirish sense of sadness for the world’s cruelty in the unfolding tragedies Maiku is powerless to prevent. Shooting in a crisp black and white, Hayashi pays tribute to Borderless action with a cameo from Jo Shishido as Maiku’s father figure while allowing Maiku to inhabit a world slightly out of time or existing only in the movies in which detectives are always hardboiled and the only way to be happy is to abandon all your hopes and dreams before the world can destroy them.

The Most Terrible Time in My Life screens 12th/18th October at Japan Society New York.

Original trailer (No subtitles)

General’s Son 3 (將軍의 아들 3 / 장군의 아들 3, Im Kwon-taek, 1992)

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The third and final instalment in the General’s Son trilogy picks up some time after the events of the previous film, not with Doo-han (Park Sang-min) being released from prison but emerging from hiding. After his showdown with Kunimoto, he’d been lying low in a temple but is now on the run, heroically jumping off a train to avoid the police and thereafter making his way to Wonsan and seeking asylum with an affiliated gang. By this time, Doo-han’s role as the son of a legendary general who was murdered by communist traitors while fighting bravely for independence seems to have been forgotten as he wanders around trying to evade the colonial net. 

In Wonsan, he immediately starts causing trouble by objecting to gang leader Shirai’s treatment of an aspiring singer, Eun-sil (Oh Yeon-soo), whom he has more or less imprisoned until she agrees to sleep with him. Doo-han helps her to escape and encourages her to continue pursuing her dreams of stardom, but motions toward romance create an ongoing instability which indirectly echoes throughout the rest of the film as he tries to balance his desire for Eun-sil with the ongoing battle for Jongno and resistance against the Japanese. 

For her part, Eun-sil falls for Doo-han as the man who saved her from Shirai and restored her freedom but still finds herself at the mercy of the Japanese as otherwise sympathetic lieutenant Gondo (Dokgo Young-jae) takes a liking to her after being struck by her singing talent which he apparently did not expect seeing as she is a mere Korean. Later Gondo and Doo-han become accidental rivals when Eun-sil is arrested because of her associations with Doo-han and they have to work together to get her out. Gondo is fiercely critical of their relationship, not only out of romantic jealously but because he finds the Korean approach to romance vulgar. Despite her later agency which sees her primed to reject both men in order to pursue her career, Eun-sil is also a mere device to emphasise Doo-han’s virility as the entire neighbourhood is kept awake by her moans of ecstasy even after Doo-han has been badly injured in a fight, is covered in bandages, and has been told he will need to stay in bed for the next month to recover. 

Gondo meanwhile, in a slightly symbolic gesture, tries to force Eun-sil to marry him by laying his sword on the table and making it plain that if she refuses he will kill her and then himself. Perhaps in a more romantic tale, he might have threatened Doo-han and asked her to make a sacrifice, but in any case Doo-han tries something much the same on hearing the news, having a kitchen knife brought to him and thrusting it into the table. Eun-sil merely seems amused, or perhaps worryingly pleased at open show of romantic jealousy as proof of love, knowing that it is quite unlikely Doo-han is actually going to hurt her (the same cannot be said for Gondo). He still however tries to command her to stay and marry him, refusing to let her leave because she is “his”, but in the end of course it’s bluster and if she chooses to leave he cannot stop her because he is not a man like Shirai or Gondo who would willingly restrict another’s freedom. He is still “fighting for our liberty” after all. 

Meanwhile, he undergoes a parallel “romance” with Dong-hae (Lee Il-jae) who left alone for Manchuria after renouncing the gangster life but has apparently left the Independence Movement because it was too socialist when what he seems to want is individual capitalist prosperity which is why he’s got mixed up in the opium trade. Still on the run, Doo-han seeks out Double Blade, the street thug mentor who brought him into the gang all those years ago. Unfortunately he makes a lot of trouble for Double Blade in annoying one of his underlings who runs a local Chinese gang and then starting a turf war after getting himself into trouble with the bandits who run the drugs trade. He and Dong-hae are eventually separated in the escape from the bandits but reunite when Hayashi (Shin Hyun-joon), who is still nominally running the yakuza but has delegated Jongno to his sadistic brother-in-law Uda, tries to use him in a plot to take out Doo-han once and for all. 

Throughout the series, Doo-han has been a mythic, comic book-style hero who is respected for the integrity of his fists, refusing to use weapons and leaving his opponents beaten but breathing so that they can verbally concede the victory. The previous film had seen him enact a more serious kind of violence, but even so his rival apparently survived only permanently changed. His final confrontation with Hayashi, by contrast, sees him kill for the first time by picking up a blade and then a gun. Nevertheless, he is perhaps the General’s Son after all. According to his gang members, scattered after he left, he is the only force with can keep Jongno free, without him they fell apart and let the Japanese take their streets from them. The final instalment in Doo-han’s story ends on a moment of tempered victory which avenges his gangster honour but places him firmly in the arms of his brother Dong-hae as they temporarily retreat from the battlefield towards an increasingly unstable future. 

General’s Son 2 (將軍의 아들 2 / 장군의 아들 2, Im Kwon-taek, 1991)

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A year after General’s Son struck box office gold, Im Kwon-taek returns to colonial Korea picking up pretty much where he left off with Doo-han (Park Sang-min) once again getting released from prison only this time to a hero’s welcome. Pushing deeper into the colonial era, The General’s Son 2 (將軍의 아들 2 / 장군의 아들 2, Janggunui adeul 2) takes place in increasingly straitened times in which the Japanese are both in control and on the offensive, using the colonial base to strike further into Manchuria while Doo-han discovers a little more about his legendary father and the fate of the Independence Movement in exile. 

Like the first film, the sequel largely consists of a series of episodes in which Doo-han fights and defeats his various rivals. The major change this time is that he begins in defeat as the early celebrations of his return give way to a dawn raid by Hayashi’s yakuza after which Doo-han is dragged into the town square and forced into submission. When Doo-han’s mentor Ki-hwan (Min Eung-shik) is also released from prison, the gang opts for a truce, but Ki-hwan then absents himself after realising Hayashi has tricked him leaving Doo-han in charge. 

During the first film Doo-han’s Korean gangsters had been presented as unambiguously good, standing between the ordinary people and Japanese oppression. While Doo-han was away, however, things have changed. The Japanese have infiltrated Jongno and the Jongno gang has lost the support of the merchants through pressing them too hard for collection money. Doo-han’s first task is then to get the smaller Korean gangs back on side, fighting the local Mokpo kingpin to ensure he resumes sending taxation payments back to Jongno. His main source conflict, however, is still with Dong-hae (Lee Il-jae), the Korean fighter working for the yakuza whom he defeated at the end of the previous film but who got his own back by getting the jump on him at the beginning of this one. 

As a defender of Korean liberty, Doo-han’s side mission is to win back Dong-hae to the side of right, reminded of their childhood meeting by a repeat of the flashback in which he helps a starving Dong-hae cadge a meal by teaching him how to dine and dash. The Dong-hae dilemma is compounded by Doo-han’s increasingly complicated love life which begins with a brief flirtation with Setsuko, a half-Korean Japanese woman working at a gangster-friendly bar who seems to have taken a liking to him, but then later transfers to Chae-hwan (Song Chae-Hwan), a new gisaeng at his regular hangout who is sweet on Dong-hae and is also carrying baggage because her late husband was stoned to death as a traitor when the Japanese discarded him. 

Through Chae-hwan, Doo-han gets to know a dissident author, Park Gye-ju, whose novel Pure Love he pays two high school students to read aloud to him because he is still illiterate. According to Gye-ju, Doo-han’s general father is dead, assassinated by communist traitors among his men including such esteemed names as Kim Il-sung, placing Doo-han at a peculiar intersection of anti-communist and anti-Japanese ideology. Despite that however, Doo-han is warned off associating with Gye-ju because of his “suspicious ideology” by his arch nemesis, Kunimoto, formerly “Lee” the Korean detective working for the Japanese who arrested him all the way back at the beginning of his journey in the first movie.

Traitorous Koreans rather than the Japanese are the main antagonists with Kunimoto first among them, but then as Chae-hwan puts it it’s not the fault of the world only the Japanese whose continuing oppression has placed them all into these perilous positions. Dong-hae weighs up his options, persuaded to end his problematic associations with Hayashi despite his previous assertion that he didn’t care where the money came from he only wanted to survive. The world abandoned us first, he explains, what else was there to do? Chae-hwan criticises Doo-han, suggesting that he’s using his fists not for the people of Korea but for himself, convincing Dong-hae that he can be “saved” if he leaves the gangster world behind. Like his nation, he decides he wants “independence”, eating his own food bought with his own money, rather than remaining at the mercy of a higher authority be that Hayashi or Doo-han. 

The Japanese army, however, believe themselves above the law and answer only to the emperor. Dong-hae’s decision brings him further into conflict with Doo-han, rejecting not just the law of the street but provoking romantic jealousy. As Chae-hwan points out love isn’t a fight you win or lose, but it’s still at the mercy of the various political forces in play and in not in any way helped by Doo-han’s childish provocation of Japanese soldiers at Setsuko’s bar. In any case, Doo-han remains a folk hero, concluding his final showdown with his first show of real violence with active consequences, but in the end protected by the people of Jongno as they offer themselves as human shields holding back the forces of oppression while Doo-han remains trapped in a world of pointless gangster violence. 

General’s Son (將軍의 아들 / 장군의 아들, Im Kwon-taek, 1990)

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Im Kwon-taek may have been among the first Korean film directors to secure a spot on the international festival circuit, but his long and meandering career began with action cinema which is where his early ‘90s blockbuster trilogy General’s Son (將軍의 아들 / 장군의 아들, Jangguneui Adeul) returns him. Quite clearly influenced by recent Hong Kong martial arts movies, ninkyo eiga yakuza dramas from Japan, and episodic fighting comics, General’s Son creates legend from recent history in further mythologising a real life street king who eventually shifted into politics in the 1950s which might be one shift too far in terms of the film’s complicated politics. 

This first instalment in the trilogy opens with Doo-han (Park Sang-min) being released from prison after apparently having been picked up for sneaking into a Japanese cinema and getting into some kind of fight. An orphan, Doo-han has spent his life on the streets as a beggar but also has a deep love of the movies and is determined to get a job at the cinema, eventually landing one as a sandwich board/announcements guy parading through the streets shouting about what’s currently on for which he gets two tickets on top of his pay. The tickets become a bone of contention when some lowlife punks try to cheat him out of them, but Doo-han is a handy boy and so he manages to beat the guys up and get the tickets back despite being stabbed in the thigh. The altercation brings him to the attention of a local gang boss who decides to recruit him because he’s in need of street muscle and even helps him get a job at the cinema which turns out to be a hub for the local organised crime community. 

The complication is that this small area of Jongno which is ruled by the gangs is also the last remaining outpost of a “free” Korea where Japanese interference is apparently minimal. There is, however, a Japanese gang presence in the form of traditional yakuza led by the youthful and handsome Hayashi (Shin Hyun-joon), who becomes the central if not direct villain. In typical gangster origin fashion, Doo-han climbs the ranks by using his fists, taking down one big boss after another but, crucially, only while his own guys collectively decide to make way for him. As one after the other is killed or arrested, they each affirm that their era has passed, they’ve been beaten, and it’s all up to Doo-han now. In fact, in this highly ritualised setting, most fights ends with the defeated party solemnly admitting that they have lost and will politely leave Jongno at their earliest opportunity. 

As for Doo-han himself, he belongs to the noble brand of gangster and becomes something of a folk hero for his spirited defence of the ordinary man in the face of “Japanese tyranny”. Of course, that ignores all the ways in which the gangsters themselves could be quite oppressive and the film does indeed resist any mention of how they make their money other than a veiled allusion to collecting protection from the market traders in order to keep them safe from harassment by the Japanese.

At the end of the film, Doo-han receives an explanation for all the crytic hints to the film’s title to the effect that he is the son of a legendary general in the Independence Movement. His role is, in effect, to be the general in Jongno holding back the Japanese incursion and saving the soul of Korea from being despoiled by colonisers intent on erasing its essential culture. Just as his father is fighting in Manchuria, Doo-han is “fighting for our liberty” on the streets of Jongno while standing up for the oppressed wherever he finds them, including the gisaeng one of whom he saves from being sold into a Chinese brothel by her father by robbing wealthy Japanese officials to pay her debt. What he’s mostly doing, however, is fighting with fellow gangsters, proving himself in tests of strength which leave his opponents breathing but humiliated and thereafter removing themselves from the game in graceful defeat. It’s unlikely the Japanese will do the same, but Doo-han will be monitoring the streets until they do.