Tag: Asao Sano

I Hate But Love (憎いあンちくしょう, Koreyoshi Kurahara, 1962)

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I hate but love posterDoes “pure love” exist in the Japan of 1962, and if so what does it look like? Yujiro Ishihara, the poster boy for youthful rebellion, might not be the best person to ask but it’s his unfulfilled media superstar that ultimately determines to find out. In I Hate But Love (憎いあンちくしょう, Nikui Anchikusho) Koreyoshi Kurahara puts the jazz clubs and delinquency of The Warped Ones to one side for a Technicolor romp that owes more to Day/Hudson than it perhaps does to James Dean or Marlon Brando. Yet there is something mildly subversive in its low level criticism of Japan’s lurch towards the consumerist future, finding only emptiness in fame and success while the central couple’s deliberately repressed desires push them towards a point of both spiritual and physical exhaustion.

Daisaku (Yujiro Ishihara) and Noriko (Ruriko Asaoka) have been a couple for two years. Noriko is also Daisaku’s manager and has been with him since he was broke and an aspiring poet. Now he’s one of Japan’s top DJs and she looks after his schedule which is packed in the extreme – in fact it leaves him no time for sleeping between his radio show, TV appearances, and meetings in bars, not to mention a late night date starting at 2am! Raiding the local papers for a suitable human interest story they can flag up on the show, Noriko stumbles over the tale of a local woman who is looking for a “driver who understands humanism”. Intrigued, Daisaku and his producer Ichiro (Hiroyuki Nagato) set off to interview her but the woman doesn’t want to be involved with the media – she doesn’t want to sully her love! The fact of the matter is, Yoshiko (Izumi Ashikawa) has kept up a romance with a doctor in a rural town by letter alone and used all her savings to buy a jeep to help transport his patients more effectively. Yoshiko doesn’t need to see Toshio (Asao Koike) – her dashing doctor fiancé, she believes in their love and that’s good enough for her. She just needs someone to actually take the jeep to Kyushu where it is most needed.

Just at this point, Daisaku’s relationship with Noriko reaches a crisis point. Lovers for two years, they each feared the sparks would fade and so to keep them popping they’ve committed to a rule of no physical contact. Spark they do (though not always in a good way), but when trapped in Daisaku’s apartment one rainy afternoon and bored out of their minds they nearly give in – damaging the fragile balance they’ve managed to build through mutual rejection of their equally mutual attraction. Though Noriko remains committed to their plan for long term romance, the non-encounter pushes Daisaku into a profound state of crisis in pondering the nature of his relationship – does “pure love” exist, does he really “love” Noriko, what is the point and the purpose of their central bond of negation? Hoping to find all of that out, Daisaku makes a surprise on air announcement that he himself will drive Yoshiko’s truck to Kyushu and see what her Toshio does with that.   

Yoshiko and Noriko set themselves up as rivals – not for Daisaku’s heart but for the true nature of “love”. “Reclaiming” Daisaku’s Jaguar so she can chase after him, Noriko has a few words for Yoshiko, pointing out that she’s been patiently “building” her love with Daisaku for 737 days. Yoshiko looks at her pityingly – you don’t “build” love, she tells her, you just believe it. For Yoshiko her letters were enough, her love an act of faith, but for Noriko love is a process and an almost scientific endeavour filled with recordable and quantifiable data. Yet everything Noriko says about Daisaku is correct – she knows who he is and truly understands him, every part of him is welcome to her and so she is perfectly placed to find him off on his magic quest even if her desire to bring him back to the city is misplaced.

Daisaku’s journey puts them both through the ringer though their bond is never seriously in question. He runs and she follows, though neither of them can quite escape the net of the society in which they live. Daisaku’s flight is perhaps more from his micromanaged yet extremely comfortable life than it is just of a difficult romance. Taking to the road he wants to feel something, to know that there is something real out there. Unfortunately, even his attempt to embrace something “real” is subverted by his media buddies who secretly film him and air the footage like it’s all been a giant publicity stunt. Fearing that their cash cow is “drunk on humanism”, they ready a contingency plan to bring him back into the fold.

Ichiro tells Noriko that her desire to “tie Daisaku down” is not love but “female egotism”. What drives Noriko isn’t really a desire for control (Daisaku seemingly allows her enough of that), but a need to be needed and fear that Daisaku, now rich and famous, will eventually leave her. Paranoid their love will fail, she rejects its consummation. Yet faith alone is not enough, as Yoshiko painfully finds out on witnessing the disconnect between her imagined love created through her letters and the real flesh and blood man before her to whom she essentially has no real connection. Reaching the end of their journey, Daisaku and Noriko are forced together again, each abandoning some part of their Tokyo lives and personas to break through to something deeper and more essential. Their path takes them straight into a bizarre summer festival complete with giant floats and excited men in traditional Japanese underwear throwing water everywhere. When they finally reach their destination, their love transcends faith to become ritual, their ennui somehow transformed into an ironic celebration of life in fulfilled desire.   

Ichiro categorises Noriko and Daisaku as stingy children – defiantly saving the best for last. There is certainly something immature in their constant bickering and bargaining, the superstition that they can keep their love alive by continually rejecting it and repressing their desire for each other, but there’s also something faintly realistic in the messy grown-up commitment phobia of it all even if it joyfully strays into the absurd. Light and bright and breezy, Kurahara works in the darknesses of early ‘60s Japan from the destructive effects of celebrity and media manipulation to the emptiness of a life of excess but even if he doesn’t quite find “pure love” he does find something close to it in a perfect merger of faith and industry.

The Incorrigible (悪太郎, AKA The Bastard, Seijun Suzuki, 1963)

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(C) Nikkatsu 1963

(C) Nikkatsu 1963

Seijun Suzuki often credits 1963’s Youth of the Beast as the real turning point in his directorial career, believing that it marked the first time he was ever really able to indulge his taste for the surreal to the extent that he truly wanted. The Incorrigible (悪太郎, Akutato, AKA Bastard), completed directly after Youth of the Beast, is another turning point of a kind in that it marks Suzuki’s first collaboration with set designer Takeo Kimura who would accompany him through his ‘60s masterpieces contributing to the uniquely theatrical aesthetic which came to be the director’s trademark.

Inspired by an autobiographical novel by Toko Kon, The Incorrigible of the title, Togo Konno (Ken Yamauchi), is a young man coming of age in the early Taisho era. He’s of noble birth and enjoys both wealth and privilege – something of which he is well aware, but is also of a rebellious, individualist character believing himself above the normal rules of civil society. Expelled from his posh Kyoto school after getting into a dalliance with a teacher’s daughter (she’s been sent off to a convent), Konno is then abruptly abandoned by his mother who has tricked him into travelling to a remote rural town where a friend of a family friend has promised to reform him at his military middle school. Konno thinks he’s too clever for this, he makes a point of deliberately failing his entrance exam in the mistaken belief that failing to get in would make him free to travel to Tokyo and start life on his own. He’s wrong, and failure to pass the exam would only entail being held back a year. Konno capitulates and agrees to start his new life as one among many in a backward little village in Southern Japan.

Though set in the Taisho era, Konno’s youth seems to suffer from the same problems that would plague the young men of 30 years later. His school is proto-militarist and hot on discipline. The boys are trained to be strong rather than smart and have inherited all the petty prejudices of their parents which they hone to the point of weaponry. The “Public Morals” department operates almost like a mini military police for students – making routine inspections of students’ home lives and keeping an eye out for “illicit” activities round and about town. Konno sees himself as grown man with a rebellious heart – he smokes openly, keeps a picture of the girl who got him into this mess in his room, and tells bawdy, probably made up stories about how he lost his virginity to a geisha (for free). He will not bow to the morality police, or any authority but his own.

Authority is something Konno seems to be good at. Picked on for his continuing preference for Japanese dress, Konno neatly deflects the attentions of the Public Morals division and comes out on top. When they raid his room and complain about his novel reading habit, he shouts them all down and gets them to sit on the floor while he “educates” them about foreign literature. Militarism has not yet arrived, but anti-intellectualism is already on the up and up. Konno’s love of literature is one of his many “deficient” qualities as teachers and students alike bemoan his “frivolous” hobbies, seeing his sensitivity and disregard for the commonly accepted ideals as signs of his unwelcome “unmanliness”.

Konno’s other big problem is, as might be expected, girls. Having been in town only moments Konno takes a fancy to doctor’s daughter Emiko (Masako Izumi) – his desire is only further inflamed after catching sight of her in the book shop and realising she too has bought a copy of Strindberg’s Red Room. She doesn’t care for Strindberg’s misanthropy, but a bond is quickly forged between the two sensitive souls trapped in this “traditional” small town where feelings are forbidden and youth constrained by social stricture.

It is, however, a love doomed to fail. The majority of Suzuki’s early work for Nikkatsu had been contemporary youth dramas, yet the artfully composed black and white photography of the Taisho setting is a melancholic affair which rejects both the rage of the modern action dramas and Suzuki’s trademark detached irony. Using frequent dissolves, The Incorrigible conjures a strong air of nostalgia and regret, a sad love story without end. Yet at its conclusion it makes sure to inject a note of uplifting inspiration as our hero wanders off into a fog of confusion, filled with a passion for pursuing truth and vowing to live without losing hope.

The Incorrigible is the fourth of five films included in Arrow’s Seijun Suzuki: The Early Years. Vol. 1 Seijun Rising: The Youth Movies box set.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Teenage Yakuza (ハイティーンやくざ, Seijun Suzuki, 1962)

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teen age yakuza poster jpgNikkatsu’s stock in youthful angst could have a nasty edge, even in their early days, but even so the Japanese teen movie is often a charming affair in which plucky youngsters defy the perils of their time from a position of relative safety. Rebellious punks die in Nikkatsu Action, but in the poppier coming of age world, innocence wins out as the angry young man finds a way to repurpose his rage for the good of society. Though Seijun Suzuki is generally associated with his “incomprehensible” work for the studio which eventually fired him in 1968, his trademark sense of absurd irony is a perfect fit for the essentially innocent world of the small town teen in ‘60s Japan.

High schooler Jiro (Tamio Kawaji) lives in a fatherless family with a grown-up older sister (Noriko Matsumoto) thinking about marriage and a mother (Kotoe Hatsui) about to open a trendy coffee shop/jazz parlour. He’s best friends with Yoshio (Hajime Sugiyama) – son of the carpenter working on the cafe, and is a typical scatterbrained teenage boy who enjoys fighting and has a “part-time job” taking illicit bets at the bicycle races. His problems start when he wins big on a bet but is hassled by a couple of punks dressed up like cowboys who deprive him of his winnings. Getting revenge, Jiro and Yoshio end up in a fight with the local gangsters in which Yoshio is stabbed in the leg and crippled for life and to make matters worse, his dad is killed in a traffic accident rushing to the scene of the crime. Filled with remorse, Yoshio turns to the dark side and falls out with Jiro while the petty punks start upping the ante and terrorising the town. The daughter of a local restaurant owner, Kazuko (Midori Tashiro), pulls Jiro in to frighten the punks off and convinces her dad to pay him for his time. Soon enough the other store owners are doing the same and Jiro is earning a pretty penny but what he thinks of as public service the store owners are beginning to think of as extortion – Jiro has become the yakuza he feared.

Like many a Nikkatsu hero, Jiro is a good kid misunderstood. He thought he was the lone voice standing up to the yakuza, the only sheriff in town and a shining beacon of justice. He didn’t see danger in taking the money because he genuinely thought it was a gift given freely out of gratitude, and perhaps to begin with it was. Danger rears its head when his sister’s fiancé suggests that Jiro’s illicit bodyguard business might cause problems for him at work and thereby endanger their marriage. When his mum talks sense into him, Jiro decides to try stopping the payments but it’s already too late. Thinking Jiro is after more money the store owners are scared, assuming Jiro will either remove his protection or turn on them as the yakuza they now believe him to be.

This sudden reversal of his self perception deeply wounds Jiro. He believed he was acting in the best interests of everyone and now has to accept he was corrupted by greed and status. He was acting like a yakuza, if accidentally, and has to accept his complicity in his present predicament. Rather than lashing out in rage and becoming the thing he’s been branded, Jiro (eventually) swings the opposite way, commits to ridding the town of yakuza but accepts that delinquency is not his best weapon.

Teenage Yakuza (ハイティーンやくざ, High Teen Yakuza) is no lone wolf story – lone wolves die at the end of Nikkatsu pictures, but Jiro and his ilk need to live to restore the peacefully innocent atmosphere that was broken by the random cowboys at the beginning. Jiro realises that saving the town is not his responsibility – at least not his alone, and he cannot do it all by himself. If the town is to be saved, it has to be because everyone chose to save it – Jiro’s job is not to fight the “yakuza”, but to make everyone else understand that the “yakuza”’s power is illusionary. Leading by example, he gradually wins them over (even the petty delinquents his original exploits helped to corrupt), ousting the growing influence of the shady gangsters through simple resistance.

A shorter, more disposable effort, Teenage Yakuza perhaps allows Suzuki wider scope for experimentation or at least allows him to express his trademark irony in a more direct way than your average programmer would. Filled with the youthful energy of the frequently echoed pop song, the twisters in the jazz bars, and the soba noodle delinquent with her cheerful ukulele, this is less youth on fire than youth breezing through. Teenage Yakuza neatly subverts the ideology of Nikkatsu’s action line, refusing the bad end for the angry lone wolf and gleefully restoring order with a hippyish plea for the solidarity of goodness. 

Teenage Yakuza is the third of five films included in Arrow’s Seijun Suzuki: The Early Years. Vol. 1 Seijun Rising: The Youth Movies box set.

A Chain of Islands (日本列島, Kei Kumai, 1965)

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nihon retto posterKei Kumai made just 19 films films in his 40 year career, but even since his earliest days he ranked among the most fearless of directors, ready to confront the most unpleasant or taboo aspects of contemporary Japan. His first film, The Long Death, interrogated wartime guilt through drawing inspiration from a real life 1948 mass poisoning case in which materials manufactured in a Manchurian lab may have led to the deaths of post-war civilians. Having begun in this possibly controversial vein, Kumai pressed on with 1965’s A Chain of Islands (日本列島, Nihon Retto, AKA The Japanese Archipelago) which he set in 1959 as Japanese youth protested the renewal of the ANPO treaty which placed Japan under the military protection of the American Armed forces in return for allowing the presence of those forces on Japanese soil.

Despite the contemporary setting Kumai opens with a explanatory voice over detailing the depth of the American military presence and the function of the CID which exists solely to investigate crimes committed by American servicemen. The CID is staffed by both Americans and Japanese nationals who, the voiceover explains, often feel conflicted in stepping onto American soil each morning as prolonged exposure gradually erodes their sense of difference and finally of “Japaneseness”. Akiyama (Jukichi Uno) is a translator/investigator at CID and he’s about to be handed an unusual request from his boss – reopen a cold case from the previous summer in which an American Sergeant was found floating in Tokyo bay. Akiyama’s new boss was a friend of the late soldier and would like to know what happened.

Akiyama’s investigations lead him down a dark path of corruption, murder, conspiracy, and governmental complicity. Beginning to investigate the case, Akiyama discovers that nothing is quite as it seems. A couple of policeman from the original investigation arrive to help him and echo their frustrations with the way the case was handled. Despite the police investigation, the American authorities did their best to interfere – commandeering the body and claiming jurisdiction in contravention of Japan’s standing as a sovereign nation. The Americans are no longer occupying forces but honoured guests who should obey international protocol in cases like these, but they rarely do. Despite the existence of the CID, crimes by American servicemen are generally covered up as the military insists the matter will be dealt with internally only for suspects to be suddenly “transferred” overseas.

Sgt. Limit was, however, one of the good ones and Akiyama’s investigation seems to point towards a murder and cover up instigated because Limit had got too close to the truth in investigating a sudden flood of counterfeit cash. The Americans, to the surprise of all, are only the middle man in the grand conspiracy which leads right back to the dark heart of Japan and the vast spy networks operated during the militarist era. As might be expected, these valuable networks are left wide open with the collapse of Japanese fascism but are perfectly primed to facilitate widespread crime spanning the Asian world and all with the tacit approval of the American and Japanese states.

Kumai also implicates the spy ring in a series of “mysterious” rail incidents, but makes sure to reserve some of his ire more the more usual injustices. Akiyama is caring for his young nephew whose father was killed in mining explosion which has claimed the lives of nearly every young man in the village leaving his sister unable to cope with her children alone. He is also battling a personal tragedy which is intensely connected to his decision to join CID which is currently inundated with cases of rape and murder in which American servicemen are implicated. The “foreign” becomes suspect but mostly for its hypocrisy as in the Catholic priest who becomes a major suspect in subverting the legitimate devotion of a Godly woman who only sought to live under the Christian teachings of love and kindness, while the American forces claim to stand for honour and justice but actively facilitate organised crime at an interstate level to further the progress of Capitalism whilst also facilitating civil unrest in volatile nations for financial and political gains.

That all of this happens immediately before the renewal of the ANPO treaty is no coincidence and Kumai even includes aerial footage of the mass protests filling the streets around the Diet building as the youth of Japan question why their nation has seen fit to make itself so complicit in the questionable foreign policy of another country. The outcome looks bleak for our protagonists who discover themselves to be mere pawns at the mercy of greater forces which cannot be circumvented or denied, but just as it all looks hopeless a new hope arises. Pledging to fight harder and continue the work which has been started, those left behind dedicate themselves to equipping the young with the tools to build a happier, fairer world in contrast to the one they seem primed to inherit from those who should know better. The final sequence shows us a young woman walking gloomily past the Diet building which seems to be looming over her as a veritable symbol of oppression but then her face brightens, her step quickens and she leaves the Diet far behind to walk forward towards the work which awaits her. 

A comprehensive overview of the 1960 ANPO protests.

Cops vs. Thugs (県警対組織暴力, Kinji Fukasaku, 1975)

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cops vs thugs J BDCops vs Thugs – a battle fraught with friendly fire. Arising from additional research conducted for the first Battles Without Honour and Humanity series and scripted by the author of the first four films, Kazuo Kasahara, Cops vs Thugs (県警対組織暴力, Kenkei tai Soshiki Boryoku) shifts the action west but otherwise remains firmly within the same universe. This is a world of cops and robbers, but like bored little boys everyone seems to forget which side it was they were on – if they truly were on any other side than their own. There are few winners, and losers hit the ground before feeling the humiliation, but the one thing which is clear is that the thin blue line is so thin as to almost be transparent and if you have to choose your defenders, a thug may do as well as a cop.

A dodgy looking guy in a dirty mac roughs up some equally dodgy looking kids. Given that the shady looking fella is played by Bunta Sugawara you’d peg him for a petty thug, but against the odds Kuno is a cop – just one with a taste for crumpled raincoats. The town he’s policing is one in the midst of ongoing gang strife following a series of breakaways and civil wars throughout the ‘50s. Things are coming to a head as rival bosses of the two breakaway factions, Hirotani (Hiroki Matsukata) and Kawade (Mikio Narita), vie for power while a former yakuza politician, Tomoyasu (Nobuo Kaneko), does his best to stir up trouble between them that Kuno is trying to keep from exploding into all out war.

Cops vs Thugs is as cynical as they come but slightly more sympathetic to its desperate, now middle aged men whose youth was wasted in the post-war wasteland. The central tenet of the film is neatly exposed by a drunken gangster who points out that at heart there’s little difference between a cop and a yakuza aside from their choice of uniform. Policemen, like gangsters, follow a code – the law, carry a gun, are fiercely loyal to their brotherhood, and at the mercy of their superiors. Good jobs were hard to come by in the devastation following the surrender, in fact one of the reasons company uniforms became so popular was that no one had decent clothes to wear and a providing a uniform was a small thing that a company could to do increase someone’s sense of wellbeing, community, and engender the feeling of family within a corporate context. The police uniform, even if it’s reduced to a badge and a gun, does something similar, as do a yakuza’s tattoos. They literally say someone has your back and will come running when you’re in trouble.

These drop outs with nowhere left to turn eventually found themselves one side of a line or on the other – the choice may have been arbitrary. Kuno says he became a cop because he wanted to carry a gun, something he could have done either way but for one reason or another he chose authority over misrule. Cops being friends with yakuza sounds counter intuitive, but many of these men grew up alongside each other, attended the same schools, perhaps even have relatives in common.

Both the police and the yakuza claim to be the defenders of honest, working people but neither of them quite means what they say. Police brutality is rife while yakuza battles reach new levels of violent chaos including, at one point, a beheading in the middle of a sunlit street. Yet the greatest threats to the population at large aren’t coming from such obvious sources, they’re hardwired into the system. Sleazy politico Tomoyasu spends his time in hostess bars and schmoozes with gangsters he uses to do his dirty work while the press look on gleefully at having something to report. Kuno may not be a candidate for police officer of the year, but he tells himself that his policy is one of appeasement, and that working with organised crime is the best way to protect the ordinary citizen. When you’re forced to work within a corrupt system, perhaps there is something to be said for flexibility.

For all of the nihilistic cynicism Fukasaku retains his ironic sense of humour, staging a violent, inefficient, and bloody murder in a tiny room where a sweet song about maternal love in which a woman sings of her hopes for the bright future of her son is playing a healthy volume. Corruption defines this world but more than that it’s the legacy of post-war desperation that says on the one hand that it’s every man for himself, but that it’s also necessary to pick a side. Cops, thugs – the distinction is often unimportant. There is sympathy for these men, and sadness for the world that built them, but there’s anger here too for those who play the system for their own ends and are content to see others pay the price for it.

Available now from Arrow Video!

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Originally published by UK Anime Network.

Detective Bureau 2-3: Go to Hell Bastards! (探偵事務所２３ くたばれ悪党ども, Seijun Suzuki, 1963)

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detective-bureau-2-3Before Seijun Suzuki pushed his luck too far with the genre classic Branded to Kill, he bided his time adding his own particular brand of zany absurdism to Nikkatsu’s standard cool guy fights crooks and gets girl formula. Detective Bureau 2-3: Go to Hell Bastards! (探偵事務所２３ くたばれ悪党ども, Tantei Jimusho 23: Kutabare Akutodomo) is just one of these efforts. Made around the time of Suzuki’s major turning points such as the similarly named The Bastard, and relatively better known Youth of the Beast, the film follows Nikkatsu’s standard pattern but allows frequent Suzuki leading man and Nikkatsu A-lister Joe Shishido to swan about the place in grand style, effortlessly manipulating everything and everyone to come out on top once again. Filled with snappy dialogue and painted with an irony filled noirish aesthetic, Detective Bureau 2-3 does not care about its plot, and wants you to know you shouldn’t either.

The action kicks off when a low level yakuza, Manabe (Tamio Kawachi), is captured by the police following a bloody turf battle. Manabe isn’t talking, the police can’t hold him much longer, and a bunch of gangsters from all factions are already waiting outside to eliminate him as soon as he’s released. Enter Tajima (Jo Shishido) – private detective and head of Detective Bureau 2-3. Managing to convince his “buddies” in the regular police that he’s exactly the right guy to sort all of this out, Tajima constructs an undercover ID, stages a daring rescue of Manabe, and worms his way into his gang to find out what’s going down in yakuza land. Whilst there he begins romancing the boss’ cold hearted girl and attempting to find out the whereabouts of a cache of stolen weaponry before getting all of the bad guys together in one place so the police can arrest them with maximum efficiency.

Even more so than Suzuki’s other films from the period, Detective Bureau 2-3 moves like a rocket with barely anytime to follow the plot even if there was one. Tajima is like some cartoon hero, half Lupin III and half Top Cat, always landing on his feet or speeding away from danger in a swanky sports car. Even when trapped (along with his love interest) inside a burning basement with no means of escape, he comes up with an ingenious solution to get the all important evidence out there in the hope that his police buddies will come and rescue him. Tajima is the guy you can always rely on to get you out of a fix, even if it gets you into an even bigger fix.

Unexpectedly, Detective Bureau 2-3 also has a mild Christmas theme as the seedy dive bar Tajima and the crooks hang out in attempts to get into the festive spirit. This is a world of gamblers and showgirls where the glamour of the smokescreen underworld undercuts the less savoury aspects the men who people it. Suzuki gives us a fair number of cabaret numbers set against the Christmassy decorations and creates an awkward situation for Tajima as his on and off cabaret star girlfriend threatens to blow his cover, even dragging him up on stage for a pointed duet about useless boyfriends who never keep their promises. Actually that all kind of works for him too because it annoys the boss’ girl, who is definitely starting to at least develop complicated feelings towards him. Trapped with her cruel yet supposedly impotent gang boss boyfriend-cum-jailer, she’s about eight different kinds of frustrated and has been waiting for someone like Tajima to come and set her free (in about eight different ways), so all of this is really going very well for him.

Detective Bureau 2-3: Go to Hell Bastards! is just as zany and frenetic as the title suggests, moving from one bizarre action set piece to another filled with exploding coke bottles and weaponised cement trucks all while Shishido grins wildly and poses in his sharp suit and trench coat. Inconsequential, yes, but Detective Bureau 2-3 never claims to be anything other than cartoonish fun as Shishido and co offer up a series of wacky one liners and breeze through the action with an effortless kind of glee. Filled with Suzuki’s visual flair, Detective Bureau 2-3 is among his lesser efforts but is undeniably good fun and another colourful outing for the increasingly cool Shishido.

Original trailer (no subtitles)