Tag: Kyosuke Machida

Crimson Wings (紅の翼, Ko Nakahira, 1958)

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A heroic pilot on a mission to get life-saving medicine to a small boy on a remote island unexpectedly finds himself frustrated by a wanted man in Ko Nakahira’s aviation thriller, Crimson Wings (紅の翼, Kurenai no Tsubasa). This is of course a time in which air travel was still something new and exciting, but not only that, it also offered immense improvements to those living far flung areas making travel to the mainland far easier and much less time-consuming. 

Time is, however, of the essence as a little boy on Hachijojima has contracted tetanus and the only stocks of the antidote on the island are out of date. If they can’t get replacements in the next few hours, it will be too late. Hachijojima is a fairly remote island in the Philippine sea that was used as a base for suicide submarine missions during the war but was developed as a tourist destination in the years afterwards in which it was dubbed “The Hawaii of Japan”. It didn’t quite take off until the 1960s tourism boom, but this is perhaps the reason why there’s an air shuttle service to Tokyo three times a week that is described by the stewardess as their most popular route. It might also explain why part of her job is acting as a tour guide, pointing out important Tokyo landmarks passengers can see from their windows as they come in to land. In any case, it’s the most obvious way to get the serum to the island seeing as there’s a charter flight set to leave in a couple of hours’ time.

But that same day across town, a CEO, Iwami (Toru Abe), is assassinated by a yakuza hitman named Itagaki (Hideaki Nitani). Predictably, he’s the one who’s charted the flight as a speedy getaway and he’s not all that keen on hanging around waiting for the delivery of the tetanus serum. One of the pilots describes Iwami as “take over king” and the “richest tycoon in post-war Japan”, which is to say they don’t have tremendous sympathy for him as someone who’s almost certainly made his money through nefarious means. Itagaki even remarks that he was “one of us,” the only difference between them being that where yakuza use guns he used money though his killing him was a matter of purely business. He didn’t ask or care why Iwami had to die, but obviously thought he was fair game anyway. 

You can tell that Itagaki is not the sympathetic kind of gangster right away when he mows down a little girl while fleeing the scene, her little yellow balloon sadly flying off into the distance. His indifference to the girl’s death is ironic considering the rest of the film revolves around the struggle to save the life of a little boy, directly contrasting his callousness with the righteousness of the pilot, Ishida (Yujiro Ishihara), who is prepared to risk his own life to deliver the serum. Ishida hadn’t previously volunteered for the job because he was supposed to be going on a Christmas Eve date with stewardess Keiko (Shinako Mine), only she tells him she has to cancel because her father is on a surprise trip to town. Unbeknownst to him, however, she’s actually blown him off to go to a Christmas market with another man. In any case, with nothing else to do he accepted the job even though it involves going in a Cessna because of a malfunction on their regular plane that will take too long to repair. 

Aside from having to take Itagaki, who is pretending to be on an emergency trip to visit his mother’s grave, Ishida is also accompanied by pushy journalist Yumie (Sanae Nakahara) who was sent to the airport to interview Keiko as part of a series about “working girls” that she doesn’t seem particularly enthused by. In fact, she’s actually quite rude, elaborating that she’s already interviewed a TV producer and a continuity girl describing them all including stewardess as “glamour jobs” that don’t require very much in the way of brains as journalism obviously does. That might in a way reflect her own resentment in that it’s obvious she feels the paper’s not giving her a fair shake because she’s a woman which might be why she jumps so hard on the tetanus story sensing the potential for a heartwarming human interest article. She does however seem to genuinely care about the little boy on Hachijojima. Not only does she immediately arrange for a large amount of the serum to be delivered by police escort but insists on going to the island herself and after figuring out Itagaki is the fugitive thanks to her transistor radio sticks to the main mission rather than switching to the one about the CEO murder. 

Ishida meanwhile remains a cool-headed wisecracker brazening it out against Itagaki in the knowledge that he can’t actually kill him because he doesn’t know how to fly a plane so all his threats are meaningless. There’s also a rather awkward subplot about Ishida’s brother being a kamikaze pilot during in the war which is intended to further bear out Ishida’s righteousness while his sister (Izumi Ashikawa) also makes a long speech about how he said if he had to he’d like to die like him and is the sort of person who can’t stand by and watch someone suffer. A lengthy sequence switches between various branches of the Japanese government and self-defence forces, as well as the US military, who all swap messages between themsleves and immediately scramble to find this one Cessna when it inevitably gets into trouble and drops off radar. The message seems to be that the system works and the authorities are ready to handle events such as this. Using some impressive aeroplane footage along with a series of split screens and a memorable opening POV shot to disguise the assassin’s identity, Nakahira gives the otherwise lighthearted thriller a little more weight while still allowing its wholesome goodness to shrine through as a collection of determined people come together to save a little boy they don’t even know who lives on a remote island where the children work in soil-pits to make extra money which might as well be a million miles away from the modern capital with greedy fat cat CEO’s and nihilistic yakuza.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Wicked Priest 5: Breaking The Commandments (極悪坊主 飲む打つ買う, Buichi Saito, 1971)

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The Wicked Priest returns for his final adventure and once again finds himself tackling the corruptions of the mid-Meiji society. Titled in English “Breaking the Commandments” (極悪坊主 飲む打つ買う, Gokuaku Bozu – Nomu Utsu Kau), the Japanese title refers to something Shinkai (Tomisaburo Wakayama) admits part way through, that his ironically non-buddhistic life revolves around drinking, gambling, and women all vices he seems unable to give up even as he continues to fight justice for the oppressed little guy amid the burgeoning capitalist society of the new Japan.

Indeed the film opens with him in a brothel where he’s exhausting one woman after another and demanding she be replaced with a fresh model while simultaneously covering for petty crook Hideji (Teruo Ishiyama) who is hiding his sex worker girlfriend in the cupboard to save her from a local gangster. In the first few instalment, Shinkai is a lecherous yet lovable rogue who in his own way respects women but in these last two instalments is certainly less kind, treating these sex workers more or less as disposable while later threatening to rape a lady gambler who tried to trick him. In any case, after realising that even Hideji who he went out of his way to help is trying to deceive him, Shinkai ends up getting involved with a local dispute over transportation licences and a nefarious land-sharking plan run by thuggish gangsters with the collusion of the police chief.

The land sharks want to take over the abandoned mansion where Hideji and his family of crooks are currently living in the company of a former samurai lord who seems to be suffering with some kind of delusion that it’s still the Sengoku era. The police chief isn’t up for the idea at first but the gangsters falsely imply that those living in this area of town are merely “jobless people and criminals” that they don’t need to worry about. But their plan depends on bringing on board Wajima who holds the license for running freight carts but Wajima is an honest man who isn’t interested in bribes and has no respect for those who exploit others. He refuses to participate in the project.

Shinkai too refuses to let the gangsters get away with mowing over Hideji and the others and is once again saved by Ryotatsu (Bunta Sugawara) who agrees to put off their final fight until Shinkai is finished cleaning up this dirty little town. He largely does this by donning an elaborate disguise and teaming up with lady gambler Gin to trick conspirator Kawashima into giving back Wajima’s (Takashi Shimura) license after setting him up so he’d lose it. Meanwhile he also tries to repair another broken father-son relationship between Wajima and his errant boy Ryutaro (Kyosuke Machida) whom he’d kicked out some years previously after he became a yakuza and got into trouble with the law. 

What seems clear is that the chaos of Meiji has allowed the greedy to profit over the changing orders of the hierarchical society, no longer bound by traditional notions of good conduct or basic humanity. The police chief first objects to the plan, stating that many people living in the area the gangsters have earmarked for their docks are honest and hardworking and shouldn’t be lumped in with “criminals”, but is soon won over by a bribe and is also supporting a mistress in a separate household. Yet even so, Shinkai turns this same weapon back on Kawashima (Fumio Watanabe) in pretending to be a general from Tokyo who will soon be his father-in-law, leveraging his social advancement to bring him back into line in appealing to his greed and ambition while hinting at a militarist future in reminding him that Wajima’s carts were essential during the Satsuma Rebellion and may be so again should the occasion call.

After seeing off a series of bounty hunters, one sent in via a honey trap that suggests the gangsters really know their enemy, Shinkai has no option but to clear out the corruption himself at the point of a sword culminating in another bloody showdown which is also in its own way a means of protecting Ryutaro from a pointless revenge. “If I die the devil in hell will be in for a big surprise!” Shinkai cooly remarks as he marches off to fight for justice, but then there’s another battle waiting for him in the postponed grudge match with Ryotatsu as the two men tussle atop a sand dune ironically trapped in a co-dependent cycle of vengeance and salvation while Shinkai’s wandering most likely will never end.

Dissolution Rites (解散式, Kinji Fukasaku, 1967)

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“We’re all legitimate businessmen now” as a former yakuza explains to a recently released foot soldier stepping out into a very different Japan in Kinji Fukasaku’s Dissolution Rites (解散式, Kaisan Shiki, AKA Ceremony of Disbanding). The funereal opening scenes feature the first in a series of dissolution rites as a man dressed in black reads from a scroll and explains that all the local yakuza clans will be disbanding because despite “working day and night for the benefit of the world and humanity in the spirit of democracy” times have changed and they find themselves unnecessary.

There at the beginning of that change, Sawaki (Koji Tsuruta) served eight years in prison for the murder of a rival gang boss to ensure his gang got hold of a local landfill site where they later built an oil complex. While he was inside, his boss died and his clan disbanded leaving him with nowhere to go but thankfully looked out for by an old friend, Shimamura, who has since become a construction magnate. On his arrival at Shimamura’s office, however, he’s ambushed in a suspected case of mistaken identity while the man driving him is killed. 

Shimamura (Fumio Watanabe) tells him he’s gone straight, but it soon becomes clear that even as yakuza forsake the streets for more organised crime they still behave like thugs using the same old tactics to get what they want. Shimamura is in cahoots with a corrupt local politician, Kawashima (Asao Uchida), and is determined to get access to another stretch of bombed out wasteland owned by an egalitarian doctor, Omachi, who refuses to sell because he’s set up a community there of marginalised people, including Sawaki’s former girlfriend Mie (Misako Watanabe), who work on his chicken farm. Meanwhile, Shimamura is targeted by rival “legitimate businessman”, Sakurada (Hosei Komatsu), who pulls a few dirty tricks of his own in an effort to cut Shimamura out of the picture.

Once again Tsuruta plays a man who is out of step with his times, partly because he’s been in prison but also in his fierce commitment to a now outdated code of gangsterdom. “The chivalry that we were taught was just a way for bosses to use their soldiers” Shimumura insists, “you’ll look foolish if you don’t get rid of it”, disingenuously casting his transformation into a legitimate businessman as a way of freeing himself from yakuza oppression. Sawaki turns down his offer to join the business because it seems a bit dodgy while intensely disappointed to discover another former colleague, Kubo (Kyosuke Machida), running a trafficking ring masquerading as a management studio for cabaret singers and strippers by tricking women with the offer of good jobs then getting the hooked on drugs and shipping to them to Okinawa to do sex work near the US bases.  

On his return, Sawaki is also stalked by the man whose arm he severed in killing the rival boss who turn out to be, like him, an old school gangster which is why he insists on his revenge only to find an unexpected kindred spirit as the two men find themselves each adrift in a world in which no one really cares about humanity and honour. Sakai (Tetsuro Tanba) chooses to walk a different path, conducting his disbandment ceremony in protest of yakuza corruption. Like many Tsuruta heroes, Sawaki also has the possibility of walking away and living a conventional family life as a husband and father having been forgiven by Mei but inevitably is pulled in a darker direction by the necessities of his code. The oil complex he helped to create is only a symbol of the duplicities of the post-war society allowing men like Shimamura to get rich while literally choking the life out of those like Mei whom they now want to kick out of her home to add insult to injury. 

There’s no one more tragic than a yakuza Sawaki admits, knowing there is no longer any place for him in an amoral gangster society while unable to simply leave it and enjoy a quiet life with the woman he loves. An indictment both of corporatised yakuza and the equally duplicitous practices of “legitimate” businesses and corrupt authorities, the film ends in another righteous assault filmed handheld with Fukasaku’s characteristically canted angles amid the chaos and confusion of a rapidly changing society. 

Yakuza Hooligans (893 愚連隊, Sadao Nakajima, 1966)

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“The world has changed,” an old school street thug is repeatedly reminded after his release from prison into a new Japan amid the tides of rising prosperity. An early effort from Sadao Nakajima, Yakuza Hooligans (893 愚連隊, 893 Gurentai) situates itself in cultural and generational abyss among those who find themselves locked out of the new society and unable to escape the immediate post-war era in part perhaps because they may not really want to.

At least it seems that way for the central trio of “hooligans” who later explain to their sometime mentor that they aren’t doing petty crime because of a lack of other options but out of devilment and a childish rebellion against a world they feel doesn’t accept them. As the film opens, they’re running a petty scam luring queuing passengers into unlicensed cabs for which they are almost arrested, stiffing the cabbie that helps them escape and then conning a takoyaki vendor out of a free lunch. Several times they’re criticised for “bullying the weak,” most obviously in their sideline seducing women and forcing them into sex work or blackmailing men who sleep with them. 

They are, however, fairly weak themselves. They like to describe themselves as a “democratic” institution in which everyone is equal and everything is shared fairly but despite supposedly having no boss they’re bossed around by almost everyone and when challenged by actual yakuza quickly back down. A generation older, failed kamikaze Sugi is released from prison after spending 15 years behind bars for killing a Chinese man as part of a petty crime gang formed in the immediate chaos after the war. Unlike his former associate Kurokawa, Sugi too claims that he doesn’t see the point in having a boss but like the younger men flounders unable to see a place for himself in the new society.

Sugi doesn’t approve of the more immoral sides of their business, particularly the rape and trafficking of women but proves just how out of touch he is when he asks the guys why they can’t just swipe some rice or clothing. In the immediate post-war period, rice and kimono were the only things which held their value but in a newly consumerist Japan they’re in plentiful supply and in fact worth relatively little. While he was inside, his former girlfriend married someone else and had a child, burning the tattoo she once had of his name on her arm clean away. She tells him that she’s sorry, but she’s happy and she doesn’t want anything to disrupt the life she has now. Falling for a middle-aged woman unhappy in her marriage and subsequently forced into sex work by the gang, he dreams of a happy family life and ultimately risks all on a confrontation with his old yakuza pal Kurokawa.

The film seems to suggest that the writing’s on the wall for men like Kurokawa too. His old school world of regimented, authoritarian gangsterdom doesn’t fit in the new Japan anymore than Sugi’s corrupted post-war idealism. A subplot revolving around Ken, a mixed-race member of the gang who hates the way they treat women because his mother was raped by a US serviceman positions the Occupation as another source of corruption leaving nothing behind itself other than moral decline and lasting trauma. But as Nobuko later says as long as you’re alive you have to go on searching for something and if one place is the same as another then you might as well move. 

The hooligans, however, seem stuck in the past. They can’t stand up for themselves or mount any real resistance to their circumstances, continuing to “bully the weak” in an attempt to mask their own weakness until racing headlong towards a confrontation with the yakuza along a bridge which quite literally hasn’t been finished yet symbolising their mutual inability to progress into the new society. Shooting with a heavy dose of irony enhanced by the whimsical jazz score, Nakajima captures a sense of contemporary Kyoto as an alienating environment caught between the ancient and the modern in which men like Sugi and the hooligans are permanently displaced yet lack the desire to escape because the newly consumerist society has little to offer them. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Father of the Kamikaze (ゝ決戦航空隊, Kosaku Yamashita, 1974)

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By the mid-1970s, Japanese cinema at least had become much more comfortable with critiquing the wartime past, considering it from a greater distance than the often raw depictions of war in the films from the previous two decades. 1974’s Father of the Kamikaze (ゝ決戦航空隊, A Kessen Kokutai), however, is among the few to skew towards the nationalist rather than the ambivalence or simple anti-war messages of other similarly themed films of its era. 

Starring ninkyo icon Koji Tsuruta who served in the air force himself, the film is a kind of biopic dedicated to Admiral Onishi who oversaw the kamikaze operations at the end of the war. As is pointed out, Onishi had been against the war in general terms even before its inception and is originally against the philosophy behind the kamikaze squadrons but as Japan’s fortunes continue to decline he becomes its biggest advocate citing a kind of sunk cost fallacy that it would be in someway unfair to the men that have already died to surrender while insisting that suicide missions are the only feasible way to turn the tide because one kamikaze could take out a hundred men by destroying battleships singlehandedly. 

The film in part attributes this extreme solution to the prevailing with your shield or on it philosophy of the contemporary society which placed extreme shame on the act of being taken prisoner. In the prologue that opens the film, a squadron of downed pilots whose heroic deaths have already been recorded is discovered alive in an American prisoner of war camp but as being a prisoner of war is so shameful and would reflect badly on the military, the decision is taken to fix the books by sending the men on a mission from which they are not intended to return. Onishi is opposed to the plan, he asks why they can’t find a way for the men to live, but the decision is already made. In any case, he describes the action of a suicide mission as a “beautiful ideal” even when insisting that a war cannot be fought in that way not least for purely practical reasons in that they do not have the resources to be wilfully sacrificing skilled pilots and their planes. 

Having come round to the idea, however, Onishi is a crazed zealot who cannot accept the idea of surrender and even goes so far as to barge into a cabinet meeting to urge ministers against a truce even though the war is clearly lost. To his mind, the only way to honour the sacrifices of those who’ve died is to fight to the last man. Kozono (Bunta Sugawara), another officer opposed to the kamikaze, eventually meets a similar fate in refusing to obey the order to lay down his arms and ending up in a psychiatric hospital. His objection had partly been that it’s wrong to turn men into ammunition, but also that the kamikaze project is itself defeatist and self-defeating when there are men such as himself who are committed to fighting on.  

In this the film leans into the image of militarism as a death cult in which dying for the emperor is the only noble goal of the whole imperial expansion. In its eventual lionising of Onishi’s image, his bloody suicide atop a white cloth resembling the flag of Japan while his parting words scroll across the screen in text, it does not shy away from his more problematic aspects in which he fails to object to a request from a junior officer that soldiers should be allowed to test their swords on American prisoners of war, roundly telling a subordinate who breaks protocol to insist that such a thing is not only morally wrong but will ruin their international reputation that he has no need to think of consequences because Japan will win this war. He claims to want to find a way of defeat that will satisfy the living and the dead, but in reality cannot accept it not least in that it would entail admitting that he sent 2600 young men to their deaths for nothing. 

Tsuruta brings the same level of pathos to his performance as he did in playing conflicted yakuza stoically committed to a destructive code, but there’s no getting away from the fact that the film focuses mainly on Onishi’s personal suffering as a man who sent other men to die for a mistaken ideal and then could not admit his mistake offering an apology only in his death in which he urged the young people of Japan to work to rebuild the nation in the name of peace. In switching to the present day and showing us Onishi’s dilapidated former residence and in fact the room in which he died with its tattered shoji and peeling paintwork, he veers towards the nationalistic in uncomfortably reinforcing the nobility of his death rather than the folly of war or absurdist tragedy of the kamikaze programme. Adopting a quasi-jitsuroku approach with frequent use of onscreen text, a narratorial voiceover, and stock footage of kamikaze in action Yamashita may portray war as madness in Onishi’s crazed devotion but cannot help depicting it as a “beautiful ideal” even in the undignified violence of Onishi’s ritual suicide. 

The Last Kamikaze (最後の特攻隊, Junya Sato, 1970)

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Junya Sato’s The Last Kamikaze (最後の特攻隊, Saigo no Tokkotai) opens with a title card explaining that it has nothing to do with the life of Matome Ugaki, which seems disingenuous at best given that the narrative has tremendous similarities with his life. In any case, 25 years after the war in a very different Japan which is perhaps becoming more willing to reexamine its wartime history, Sato’s film nevertheless walks an ambivalent line clearly rejecting the idea of the kamikaze special attack squadrons as absurd and inhuman yet simultaneously glorifying the deaths of the men who willingly took part in them. 

For sympathetic Captain Munakata (Koji Tsuruta) the issue is one of consent and willingness more than it is of essential immorality. Placed in charge of the very first suicide attack, he elects to go himself rather than ask someone else but is first overruled before deciding to go anyway after appealing for volunteers and coming up one short. His general, Yashiro (Bontaro Miake), who had voiced his opposition to the policy in the opening sequence reminding his own commander than even when men were given impossible missions in previous wars they were always ordered to return home if possible, takes the unprecedented step of climbing into an aircraft himself in an act of protest insisting that this be the last and final time that men were ordered to their deaths. The mission, however, does not succeed. All of the pilots bar Yashiro are shot down before reaching their targets while Munakata, injured and having lost sight of the general, aborts his mission and returns to base only to face censure from his superior officers. 

Sent back to Japan, he wrestles with himself over whether his decision was one of cowardice and he turned back because he was afraid to die rather than, as he justifies, because he did not want to die in vain and did what he thought was right. Far from cowardice, it may have taken more courage for him to ignore his orders and choose to live yet there must also be a part of him that believes dying to be heroic if not to do so is to be a coward. As the situation continues to decline and suicide attacks become the only real strategy, Munakata is recalled for an ironic mission of heading the escort squad designed to protect the pilots from enemy attack so they can reach their targets. He first turns this down too not wanting to be an angel of death but is finally convinced to accept on the grounds that the men will die anyway and at least this way their deaths will have meaning. 

Munakata was greeted on his return to Japan by the sight of his father (Chishu Ryu) being carted off by the military police for expressing anti-war views, stopping only to tell him that people should be true to their own beliefs. Nevertheless, even if Munataka objects to the tokkotai strategy he does not oppose it only emphasise that the men should should be willing and resolved rather than forced or bullied. There is indeed a shade of toxic masculinity in the constant cries of cowardice along with a shaming culture that insists a man who refuses to give his life for his country is not a real man. Munakata comes to the rescue of a young recruit, Yoshikawa (Atsushi Watanabe), who twice returns from a tokkotai mission claiming engine trouble but does not try to save him only to petition his superiors that he be given ground duty until such time as he gets used to the idea of dying. Because of Munakata’s kindness in saving him from a suicide attempt after being rejected by the mother he worried for if he were to die, Yoshikawa is pushed towards a “hero’s death” that does at least help to change the mind of Yashiro’s zealot son (Ken Takakura) who knew nothing of the reasons behind his father’s suicide and believed wholeheartedly in the necessity of the special attack squadrons. 

The younger Yashiro’s rationale had been that to show compassion to a man like Yoshikawa was to shame the memories of the men who had already died, yet even in realising the futility of the gesture he still resolves to proceed towards his own death as do others like him such as a student who had been against the war and ironically consents to the suicide mission in order to end it more quickly. “There’s nowhere to run to” Yoshikawa’s mother (Shizuko Kasagi) had said on his attempted desertion, echoing the words of another that there was no escape from this war, while poignantly crying over her son’s ashes that she wishes she had raised him to be a coward. The human cost is brought fully home as the families storm the airfield fence in an attempt to wave goodbye to their loved ones as they prepare for their glorious deaths, another pilot reflecting on the fact that each of these men is someone’s precious son rendered little more than cannon fodder in an unwinnable war. Even with the escort squads, only 30% of the special attacks succeed. Most of the pilots are so young and inexperienced that even assuming they survive the anti-aircraft fire they are incapable of hitting their targets. 

To add insult to injury, Munakata returns from his final mission to an empty airfield where a drunken engineer (Tomisaburo Wakayama) explains to him that the war is over and the generals knew it 10 days earlier but still sent these men to their deaths anyway. Overcome with remorse, Munakata posits his own suicide mission but is instructed to live on behalf of all those who died only to take off and fly into a technicolor sunset as Sato switches from the period appropriate black and white to vibrant colour elegising Munakata’s death while lending it an otherwise uncomfortable heroism. Casting ninkyo eiga icons Koji Tsuruta and Ken Takakura as the infinitely noble yet conflicted pilots and employing jitsuroku-esque narratorial voice to offer historical context the majority of the audience probably does not strictly need, Sato rams home the righteousness of these men while casting them as victims of their times trying their best to be true to what they believe but finding little prospect of escape from the absurdity of war. 

Rub Out the Past (日本暗黒街, Masaharu Segawa, 1966)

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A former yakuza’s attempts to shed his old identity and start again as an upscale restaurateur are disrupted by the unwelcome appearance of an old acquaintance in Masaharu Segawa’s noirish drama, Rub Out the Past (日本暗黒街, Nihon Ankokugai). Another “akokugai” or “underworld” film, Segawa’s surprisingly subversive Toei crime story involves not only the drugs trade but hints of Manchurian transgression as the hero tries to forget his past while unable to realise his love for the daughter of a man he killed on the order of his boss. 

Now calling himself Yashiro, Kageyama (Koji Tsuruta) runs a swanky bar in Kobe and is in love with his pianist Yoko (Eiko Muramatsu) who is also, though she doesn’t know it, the daughter of a former associate back in his yakuza days whom he apparently killed for otherwise unclear reasons leaving Yoko and her mother alone and defenceless in Manchuria during the evacuation at the end of the war. When a mysterious man arrives and explains he’s from “Hayami Industries”, Kageyama is reluctant to listen but eventually forced to accompany him to Tokyo where he is led into Hayami’s rather swanky new office complete with electronic displays and workers positioned in tiny booths. Since the end of the war, Hayami has become a “respectable” businessman running some of Asia’s most prestigious hotels in addition to a chain of casinos. Yet his real business is of course in drug smuggling, which is a problem because the guy he put in charge of the Hong Kong route has drawn the attention of the police. He makes Kageyama an offer he can’t refuse ,much as he tries, to take it over. He accepts on the condition it’ll just be a one time thing. 

In any case, Kageyama’s involvement with Hayami soon costs him his relationship with Yoko, who is aware of Kageyama’s criminal past but blames Hayami for her father’s death, and with it a potential for redemption. Details are few, but there are constant references to the gang’s illegal and immoral dealings in Manchuria, a time that Kageyama is keen to leave in the past having made a new more honest life for himself in the post-war society while Hayami has shifted into the increasingly corporatised realms of contemporary organised crime. Yet despite himself Kageyama is good at being a gangster, effortlessly subduing the bumbling head of “Sekiya Industries” and realising that part of the problem is that too many of his men are getting high on their own supply. To streamline the business he lays off drug users telling them to come back when they’re clean and temporarily pauses the business while he reorganises it at street level. This however leaves a small vacuum in the underworld economy which is soon filled by “alternative” suppliers. 

More akin to one of Toho’s spy spoofs, Hayami Industries seems to be incredibly keen on zany gadgets like cigarette lighters that double as secret radios and guns which shoot listening devices not to mention the panel wall which hides Hayami’s secret control room or the knuckle dusters and belt swords sported by the Sekiya guys. All of which is slightly at odds with the seriousness of the constant reminders of abuses in Manchuria and on the Mainland, and the frankness with which drugs are treated onscreen with frequent shots of syringes and powder. As usual in these films, the main villain is from Hong Kong, an unhinged maniac who kidnaps Yoko and gets her hooked on drugs partly at the instigation of Hayami who seems to be making something of a strategic blunder in his attempts to manipulate Kageyama. Yet Kageyama can only get his redemption through reassuming his wartime persona to face Hayami if indirectly in trying to engineer a gang war between middlemen with Hong Konger Tei caught in the middle. 

Segawa adds to the noir feel through the melancholy jazz score reinforcing the fatalism and futility that seems to define Kageyama’s life as he tries but fails to escape from his violent past. A product of wartime misuse he finds himself at odds with the contemporary society, inconveniently falling in love with the daughter of a man he killed and therefore unable to move on from the shadow of his life of crime only granted a second chance after losing everything and paying his debt to society by destroying the system he himself helped to create. 

The Thief in Black (黒の盗賊, Umetsugu Inoue, 1964)

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Best known as a master of the musical, Umetsugu Inoue had a long and varied filmography embracing almost every genre imaginable. He began his career at Shintoho and later joined Nikkatsu where he quickly became an in demand director often working with top star Yujiro Ishihara, but took the somewhat unusual step of going freelance in 1960 thereafter working at various studios including Shaw Brothers in Hong Kong. 1964’s The Thief in Black (黒の盗賊, Kuro no Tozoku) is not a musical but is characteristically playful even within the confines of the lighter side of Toei’s jidaigeki adventures. 

Set between the Battle of Sekigahara and the Siege of Osaka, the samurai corruption in play is essentially the burgeoning Tokugawa dictatorship, the heroes eventually uncovering Ieyasu’s secret plan for making sure his line (well, more himself in essence) remains in power for perpetuity through an insidious plot to weaken the feudal lords and ensure their loyalty to him. Meanwhile, the still developing city of Edo is beginning to turn against the Tokugawa who seem to be intent on exploiting ordinary people to enrich themselves most obviously through forcing the local workforce to renovate Edo castle rather than cleaning up the town which is apparently rampant with crime. Faced with such lack of leadership, the townspeople have come to admire a Robin Hood-like vigilante known only as the Thief in Black who alone is resisting overreaching lords. 

Part of the problem is that Ieyasu’s rule is still insecure because of the potential threat of Hideyori Toyotomi in Osaka. Consequently, they are fearful that some of the men working on the castle may be Toyotomi spies or otherwise disclose information that might benefit him if he chose to attack which is why they’ve refused the workers permission to return home to their families during the pause before beginning the second phase of works leading to further unrest. Meanwhile, corrupt local lord Tadakatsu (Ryutaro Otomo) and his sleazy priest buddy Tenkai (Minoru Chiaki) have an even darker plan in mind, preparing to simply kill the five master craftsmen in charge to ensure they present no threat. Alerted to the situation on the ground by idealistic samurai Jiro (Hashizo Okawa), their boss instructs Tadakatsu in no uncertain terms that he must treat the workers fairly in order to prevent civil unrest and/or disillusionment with the Tokugawa regime but the pair are entirely unfazed and determined to go on with their nefarious plan getting rid of Jiro if the occasion arises. 

As we later discover and in a typical jidaigeki plot device, Jiro is one of a pair of twins with his brother Kotaro (also Hashizo Okawa) abandoned because of the superstitious belief that multiple births are inauspicious. Though both men unwittingly lay claim to the name, Kotaro turns out to be the masked vigilante, his primary cause to regain the lands of the family who raised him unfairly displaced from their estates on the Musashino plains because of Tokugawa greed. Though Jiro, raised as a member of the establishment, is originally loyal to the Tokugawa who have after all brought about an era of peace, he soon begins to see that their rule is no good for the people of Edo. In his more egalitarian worldview, only by enriching the poor can they secure their rule which means less castle building and more infrastructural development along with paying people fairly for their work and absolutely not killing them afterwards. Kotaro too claims that his rebellion is for the good of the common people though unlike Jiro is much more transgressive in his ideology prepared to shake off his samurai status to become a wandering outlaw rather than content himself with the restrictive life of the heir to a samurai clan. 

Such messages are perhaps common in Toei’s brand of jidaigeki but seem unusually pronounced as the peasant workers are often given voice to lament their fate and resist their oppression more directly, pointing the finger not just at a rogue rotten lord but at the entire system built on exploiting their labour. Nevertheless, Inoue injects a hearty dose of whimsical humour to the politically charged narrative even going so far as to include a bumbling ninja claiming to be the famous Hattori Hanzo along with a comic relief magistrate and former samurai brothel owner taking his own kind of ironic revenge in getting the cowardly lords hooked on modernity with a load of faulty rifles. Obviously, Ieyasu couldn’t be stopped, but perhaps they slowed him down and reminded him of the dangers of underestimating the people. Shot with Inoue’s characteristic flare if remaining largely within the Toei house style, Thief in Black is a surprisingly direct attack on corrupt and entitled government but also a righteous romp as its idealistic heroes shuffle themselves back into their ideal positions while fighting Tokugawa oppression all the way. 

The Story of a Man Among Men (修羅の群れ, Kosaku Yamashita, 1984)

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The ninkyo eiga, chivalrous tales of noble gangsters standing up for the little guy with decency and honour, had been Toei’s mainstay throughout the 1960s but a decade later the image of righteous yakuza had been well and truly imploded by the advent of the jitsuroku or “true account” movie which drew inspiration from real life tales of post-war gangsterdom using voiceover narration and onscreen text for added authenticity as it proved once and for all that there was no “honour and humanity” to be found in the gangster life only nihilism and futility. Still, the ninkyo, like many of its heroes, proved hard to kill as 1984’s Story of a Man Among Men (修羅の群れ, Shura no Mure) perhaps proves. A throwback to an earlier era with its infinitely noble hero and unexpectedly if not quite happy then defiantly positive ending, Kosaku Yamashita’s manly drama nevertheless adopts some of the trappings of the jitsuroku in its infrequent use of voiceover and emphasis on concrete historical events. 

The hero, Ryuji Inahara (Hiroki Matsukata), is like many heroes of post-war gangsterdom an orphan though his story begins in the mid-1930s as he’s recruited by a friendly yakuza at a karate dojo. As his teacher explains, Ryuji has already been offered a job with the police but given the chance to join the other side instead immediately agrees, explaining that his life’s ambition has been to gain revenge against the force that ruined his father and destroyed his family, gambling. He chooses to do this, however, not by destroying gambling dens everywhere but by becoming a gambler himself determined to be a winner which is, it seems, a textbook example of having learned the wrong lesson. Still, his noble gangster cool stands him in good stead in the yakuza world where he quickly earns the loyalty of other men, rapidly advancing up the ranks to head his own gang by the crime heyday of the mid-1950s. 

As the title implies, this is a story of a man, a very manly man, among other men. The gangster world is intensely homosocial and founded on ideas of brotherhood and loyalty. Thus, Ryuji finds a surrogate father figure in fellow gangster Yokoyama (Koji Tsuruta) who constantly gives him advice on what it is to be a proper man. “Don’t be a fool, don’t be too smart, and most of all don’t be half-hearted” he advises, later adding “you can’t be a man if you’re dirty about money”, and “taking action isn’t the only way to be a man. It takes a man to have patience.” (this last one as Ryuji hotheadedly discharges himself from hospital to get revenge on a punk who got the jump on him outside a shrine). To be a man, Ryuji intervenes when he sees some less than honourable young toughs hassling an old couple running a dango stand at the beach and the young woman from the caramel stall next-door, throwing his entire wallet on their counter to make up for the damage in what will become something of a repeated motif. His manliness earns him the eternal devotion of the young woman, Yukiko (Wakako Sakai), who eventually becomes his devoted wife against the will of her concerned mother who is nevertheless brought round on realising the love she has for him because of his intense nobility. 

Indeed, Ryuji lives in a noble world. He’s a gambler by trade but only because he hates gambling and is trying to best it. He doesn’t participate in the seedier sides of the yakuza life such as drugs or prostitution and is also in contrast to jitsuroku norms a humanist who defiantly stands up against racism and xenophobia, taking another gambler to task for using a racial slur against a Korean opponent while opting to befriend the “foreign” gangs of Atami when eventually put in charge of the lucrative area rather than divide and conquer. This is apparently a lesson he learned from his flawed but goodhearted father who hid a Korean man and his daughter from the pogroms after the 1923 earthquake because “we’re all the same human beings”. Spared the war because of an injury to his trigger finger, Ryuji kicks off against an entitled son of a gang boss for acting like a slavedriver while working at a quarry but earns only the respect of his superiors further enhancing his underworld ties because of his reputation as a standup guy willing to stand up to oppression. 

Such an intense sense of uncomplicated righteousness had perhaps been unseen since the ninkyo eiga days, and Ryuji’s rise and rise does in that sense seem improbable as his goodness only aids his success earning him the respect of over 1000 foot soldiers even as he finds himself in the awkward position of having to exile one of his most trusted associates for getting too big for his boots and disrespecting the yakuza code. His children also suffer for their connection to the gangster underworld, but are reassured that their father is a good man if with the subtle implication that he has damned them as his father did him. Shot with occasional expressionist flourishes such as crashing waves or a midnight sky, A Story of a Man among Men is not free from manly sadness and indeed ends on the sense of a baton passing from one era to another but does so with an unexpected sense of moral victory for its righteous hero who vows to bring his manly ideas with him into a new age of gangsterdom. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

A True Story of the Private Ginza Police (実録・私設銀座警察, Junya Sato, 1973)

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By the early 1970s the ninkyo eiga (pre-war tales of noble yakuza) had begun to fall from favour. Modern audiences were perhaps unconvinced by the romanticism of the honourable gangster caught between personal loyalty and his inner humanity, real life thugs are rarely so high minded after all. The cinema industry may have been in decline, but the consumerist revolution was well underway, the economic miracle was nearing completion, and there was perhaps a readiness to reckon with the recent past from a position of relative safety. The jitsuroku eiga did just that, providing a more “realistic” depiction of the yakuza life based on the recollections of real life gangsters and incorporating the aesthetics of reportage with the use of stock footage, newspaper montage, narratorial voiceover, and high impact text recording the names of characters along with the times of their deaths. 

Released in the same year as Kinji Fukasaku’s Battles Without Honour and Humanity which has perhaps become the jitsuroku archetype, Junya Sato’s A True Story of The Private Ginza Police (実録・私設銀座警察, Jitsuroku: Shisetsu Ginza Keisatsu) paints an even bleaker picture of the immediate post-war era as one in which chaos and inhumanity rule. The pre-credits sequence follows demobbed soldier Watarai (Tsunehiko Watase) who finds himself in a bombed out warehouse where a woman is drinking around an open fire with a US serviceman. Standing motionless he stares at an upper balcony where another woman is having sex with a black GI. It seems this woman is known to him, perhaps his wife or in any case a woman he thought he was coming back to. She is not overjoyed to see him, breaking down in tears while he spots a baby girl crying in the corner who also happens to be black. Unthinkably he takes the child and throws her into a flooded area of the floor below, chasing the mother when she goes after the baby, strangling and then bludgeoning her to death with a rock. 

All of this has happened in the first five minutes. There will be no heroism here, no noble act of resistance only shame and desperation. These are men brutalised by war who’ve come home to a land in ruins where the enemy is now in charge, ruling their streets and sleeping with their women. They are humiliated and resentful, many of them still in uniform likely because they simply have no other clothes. Sato introduces us to the later gang members in turn beginning with a scene which echoes those of the Battles Without Honour series as Iketani (Noboru Ando) is chased and beaten by an angry mob in the chaos of the marketplace after being accused of stealing. Masaru (Tatsuo Umemiya) meanwhile is beaten by GIs who come to the rescue of a sex worker he tries to rape, offended when she tells him she doesn’t go with Japanese customers dismissing him as “just another defeated soldier”. Iwashita (Hideo Murota) uses his service revolver to commit an armed robbery to get money to gamble. Only the gang’s later leader, Usami (Ryoji Hayama), is introduced without a wartime record, named only as a pre-war gangster. The gang is forged when they meet by chance in a gambling den and bond over a grenade, mounting a military operation against the Korean street gang who hassled Iketani by bombing their HQ. 

A few months later they’ve become the “Private Ginza Police Force” of the title, now all in smart suits, loud shirts, and sunshades. They have their eyes set on ruling the area, taking down rival gangsters the Nakane brothers through cunning and trickery, turning an underling by threatening his family. But there is no honour among thieves and the gang is only a temporary arrangement intended to last only as long it’s useful. Iketani goes his own way, starting a small business running black market goods from China, bribing the police to turn a blind eye while Usami runs a conventional protection scam targeting the Chinese owner of a cabaret bar, Fukuyama (Asao Uchida), run as a front for black market smuggling. The problems start when Iketani learns that Fukuyama has been colluding with a government accountant to misappropriate money intended to be used for subsidies. 

This world is infinitely corrupt, from the easily bribed policemen to the civil servants out for all they can get and those who merely make use of them like Fukuyama and Iketani. While the guys get rich opening gambling clubs in Ginza, a wide scale famine creates a shantytown of starving poor at Ueno station where six die per day from hunger. Iketani is in someways the “noble” thug, he looks after his guys and pays attention to their lives, perhaps even claiming that his black market activities are a public service but it’s still every man for himself and if he’s assuming post-war chaos is on its way out he is sadly mistaken. Having got him hopped up on heroine and used him as a ghostly assassin, the gang jokingly refer to Watarai as a zombie, somehow surviving every bizarre death experience that comes his way including being buried alive, but they are walking dead too, soulless men who left their humanity on the battlefield. Fearing the game may be up, Masaru suggests one last hurrah blowing their ill-gotten gains on sake and women. “I’ll show you how rape is done,” Usami deliriously exclaims”, “how we used to do it on the continental front.” Meanwhile, Masaru throws notes all around the room screaming “Rejoice! There will be no tomorrow” sending all into a Bacchanalian frenzy as they cram as much cash as they can grab inside what little clothing they still have on.

All moody, anarchic jazz score and canted angles, Sato’s post-war Tokyo is a world of constant anxiety, a maddening no man’s land of fire and rubble inhabited by ghosts of men who died long ago for whom the war never ended. In true jitsuroku fashion, the picture ends on a note of fatalistic nihilism, the screen filled with red as the narrator cooly informs us what became of our heroes as they find themselves consumed by the futility of their lives of violence.

Original trailer (no subtitles)