Tag: Masao Yagi

The Great Chase (華麗なる追跡, Norifumi Suzuki, 1975)

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What about if you rebooted the Bannai Tarao series, but the hero was a female spy who is also a champion race driver and martial artist? Norifumi Suzuki did actually make a Bannai Tarao move in 1978 starring Akira Kobayashi, but the heroine of The Great Chase (華麗なる追跡, Karei-naru Tsuiseki) certainly loves a disguise or two and like the famous man of a thousand faces seems to have no trouble pulling them off as she infiltrates a gang of evil traffickers led by a furry which has come up with an ace new plan of packing heroin into coffins and having them shipped to nuns!

Oh, and the gang were also behind the death of her father who “committed suicide” in prison after being framed for drug smuggling. The Great Chase takes place in a world of pure pulp which somehow maintains its sense of cartoonish innocence even after Shinobu (Etsuko Shihomi) has infiltrated the heart of darkness and seen most of her associates killed by sadistic gang boss Inomata (Bin Amatsu). But at the same time, it delves into a deep sense of ‘70s paranoia as it becomes clear that the authority figures are all corrupt. Inomata has become a politician, while Shinobu’s father’s murder was orchestrated by the prison warden who was working with him in return for financial gain. The man who framed her father was a friend of his, implying that no one can really be trusted when there’s money to be made.

In a roundabout way,as this sense of anxiety is only reinforced by Shinobu’s role as some sort of secret agent working for the spy ring run by her uncle which is currently hot on the trail of the drug dealers even if they haven’t yet figured out who their boss is. Conversely, her home life is as wholesome as it could be with her two adopted siblings who run a florist’s along with Shinobu’s fan club. Her status as a kind of race car idol lends Shinobu a particular kind of ‘70s cool and turns her into some sort of superhuman figure capable of triumphing over any kind of adversity like a superhero worthy of any kid’s lunchbox. The siblings, Nagi (Fujika Omori) and Shinpei (Naoyuki Sugano), were taken in as orphans by her father which once again signals his goodness in contrast to the greed and selfishness of the gang that had him killed to cover up their crimes. 

That they peddle in drugs marks them out as a force of social disruption, but they’re also actively heretical in hiding behind the shield of the church. Suzuki frequently uses religious imagery in his films and here again echoes the romanticism of School of the Holy Beast with the use of red roses to decorate the coffin of the unfortunate young woman who has been turned into a vessel for smuggling drugs and has for some reason been laid out otherwise entirely naked. When it comes to retrieving the merchandise, we can see that many of the habits are being worn by men while Inomata himself masquerades as a priest. Then again, perhaps he is merely indulging his love of costume play seeing as he also has a hobby of wearing a furry bear suit to attack and rape women in his living room. 

Inomata’s claws then seem to represent something else, a rapacious, grasping sense of patriarchy in which he also uses drugs to bind women to him. Shinobu’s childhood friend Yukiko (Hisako Tanaka) has apparently fallen victim and laments that she is possessed by him body and soul to the point that the old Yukiko is dead which is why she hasn’t been able to step in and help Shinobu and is doing so now fearing that it may cost her her life. Suddenly, it’s all quite grim with the basement sex cult, whipping and torture, but Shinobu maintains her plucky spirit and is somehow able to lure Inomata towards a cable-car-based showdown. With a cameo from real life wrestler / singer Mach Fumiake, the film enters a kind of meta commentary on a real-life Shinobu (though she was not, as far as anyone knows, one of Japan’s top spies), but otherwise remains within the realms of pulp in which the heroine is able to pull off her difficult mission with the help of her talent for disguises before dramatically unmasking herself as the woman who’s going to take them all down. Camp to the max and incredibly surreal, the film never drops its sense of silliness even as the grim events enveloping Shinobu lead to tragic consequences that she barely has time to deal with before barrelling straight into the next duel with the forces of corruption.

*Norifumi Suzuki’s name is actually “Noribumi” but he has become known as “Norifumi” to English-speaking audiences.

Killer’s Mission (賞金稼ぎ, Shigehiro Ozawa, 1969)

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According to the title card at the beginning of Shigehiro Ozawa’s Killer’s Mission (賞金稼ぎ, Shokin Kasegi), none of the events it depicts have been recorded in history because the shogunate decided to erase them all in fear of the effect they may have on the nation’s geopolitical stability. Nevertheless, it gives some very concrete dates for its historical action, even if they may not make complete sense while foreshadowing the political turbulence of the following century. 

What it essentially attempts to do is tell a James Bond-style tale of political intrigue in a feudal Japan in which perpetual peace has begun to create its own problems. Here played in a cameo appearance from Koji Tsuruta, the Shogun Ieshige was weak in part because he was in poor health and had a speech impediment which led him to be rejected by his retainers. The problem here, however, is with Satsuma which has been on bad terms with the Tokugawa shogunate since the Battle of Sekigahara after which they took power. Satsuma will in fact be at the centre of the conspiracy to overthrow the government in the following century, but for the purposes of the film have fallen foul of a rumour that the plan to do an arms deal with some Dutch sailors who sailed South to Kyushu after being rebuffed in Edo. 

A civil war is feared and in the interests of maintaining peace, Ieshige sends his trusted spy Ichibei (Tomisaburo Wakayama) to protect Satsuma official Ijuin Ukiyo (Chiezo Kataoka) in the hope that he will be able to talk his young and naive lord out of doing the deal. Ostensibly a doctor by trade, Ichibei has a series of spy gadgets such as hidden blades and collapsible guns stored in a secret room at his surgery which he then carries in a black leather utility belt. He keeps the nature of his mission close to his chest, but often double bluffs by simply telling people he is a shogunate spy or otherwise adopting a disguise as he does in a moment of meta comedy impersonating the signature role of his brother Shintaro Katsu by posing as a Zatoichi-style blind masseur. 

As if to signal the cruelty of the feudal world, Ichibei comes across the corpses of suspected spies abandoned outside Satsuma territory while his enemies meditate on their ancient slight and consider taking the deal in the hope of avenging their defeat and overthrowing the Tokugawa. They are warned that creating unrest and sowing division may be exactly what foreign powers like the Dutch crave, but aren’t particularly bothered, preferring to take their chances with them rather than curry favour with the Shogun and possibly destabilising the entire society along with it. 

Of course, much of this is anachronistic with the Dutch sailors appearing in a distinctly 19th century fashion carrying weapons which are also too advanced for the era as are Ichibei’s folding pistols. Through his travels, he runs into a female Iga spy who too can do some nifty ninja tricks and has a gadget of her own in a comb which can shoot poison darts, though luckily it’s one of the poisons Ichibei has already developed an immunity to. Ichibei is fond of crying that you kill him he’ll simply come back to life, barrelling through the air with feats of improbable human agility and generally behaving like some kind of supernatural entity with a secondary talent for violent seduction. 

Though ironic and often darkly comic, there is an unavoidable poignancy in the inner conflict of Ijuin who knows his clan is about to do something very foolish but is torn between his duty to obey them and that to act in their best interests, eventually backed into a corner and left with no real way out of his predicament. As Ichibei points out, it’s difficult to keep the peace, especially when restless young samurai spot opportunities to cause chaos and the outside world knocks on the door of a closed community. Even so, Ozawa ends on a romantic image of a beach at sunset somehow undercutting the violence and tragedy with the restoration of an order that might itself be imperfect in its peacefulness.

School of the Holy Beast (聖獣学園, Norifumi Suzuki, 1974)

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“Why is sex wrong?” a rebel nun enquires, hinting at the hypocritical atmosphere of the convent which comes to stand in for the patriarchal superstructure of the contemporary society. That it does so might in a way be surprising given that Christianity has relatively little cultural relevance in Japan save its stance as a persecuted religion during the feudal era. Director Norifumi Suzuki jumps on the nunsploitation bandwagon but does so with a baroque romanticism mixed with punkish youthfulness as two young women find themselves rebels in the house of God.

They are both there for reasons largely unconnected to religion. 18-year-old Maya (Yumi Takigawa) is searching for the truth behind her birth and her mother’s death, while Sister Ishida (Emiko Yamauchi) claims she’s been sent there by a wicked stepmother. Ishida also kicks up a stink during a class by questioning the truth of immaculate conception which is quite odd for someone who wanted to become a nun, while otherwise punished for drinking whisky in the middle of the night. Punishment does seem to be the main thrust of their religious practice with the transgressions of “adultery”, which includes all impure thoughts, murder (!), and theft taken the most seriously. On her first night at the convent Maya is woken by the sound of another nun furiously whipping herself though in fairness there just isn’t much else to do. 

Suzuki rams home the erotisicm of ritual in the baptism Maya undergoes during her initiation as a nun in which she is totally nude and instructed to stand with her arms out as if on the cross in front of the altar. She must then bend to kiss the crucifix before receiving her veil as a bride of Christ. The nuns talk of lives of eternal virginity while burying themselves in asceticism in an effort to deny their natural desires but have to a degree sublimated their lust in violence. The most common form of punishment is whipping, while Maya is later tortured with thorns and artfully battered by roses. When one nun steals money in guilt for having abandoned her impoverished family to begin her spiritual journey to Christ, she confesses herself to a priest who offers her the same amount so that she can help her family and ease her conscience by returning it. But in reality the priest has tricked her. He resents that she feels as if her sin has been forgiven and she may forget her guilt, cruelly telling her that she will never hear the voice of God before going on to violate her. 

The act of betrayal, of himself breaking the code to which he should subscribe, is only a echo of an societal corruption which allows men to abuse their power often with the complicity of the women around them such as the abess who has long been in love with him. Kakinuma (Fumio Watanabe) is a man whose faith has been shaken. He bears the scars from exposure to the atomic bomb in Nagasaki which is centre of Christianity in Japan. After telling Hisako (Yayoi Watanabe) that God will not see her, he asks if anyone has actually seen him and why he does nothing when his people suffer. 

Both he and the abbess are trapped in a hell of their own making, though as the girls both say the convent is akin to a prison. When Hisako’s sister visits her they talk to each other through glass as if she were a prisoner, though in many ways she is oppressed by her own repressed desires while those of the other nuns have begun to drive them quietly out of their minds and into sadomasochistic fury. This peculiar madness is only deepened by the arrival of a new Mother Superior who returns from Europe insistent on rooting out “witches” in league with the devil. Suzuki signals the absurdity by playing a chorus of elation when a tortured nun wets herself over a tablet featuring a crucifix in the inversion of a bizarre Edo-era ritual designed to identify secret Christians who were at that point illegal. 

To break free of the covent and return to her liberated life in contemporary Japan as seen in the cheerful opening sequences of her date with Kenta (Hayato Tani), Maya must also free her mother’s ghost and the souls of her sisters by forcing Kakinuma to reckon with his crimes if in the most ironic of ways. Suzuki shoots with febrile romanticism, the pastel colours of the church lending it a hellish glow even before the resurrection of a ghost enacts karmic revenge in a feverish atmosphere of romantic jealously and masochistic repression.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

*Norifumi Suzuki’s name is actually “Noribumi” but he has become known as “Norifumi” to English-speaking audiences.

The Tattooed Hitman (山口組外伝　九州進攻作戦, Kosaku Yamashita, 1974)

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The close brotherhood between two men is disrupted by changing times in a more contemporary gangster drama from Kosaku Yamashita, Tattooed Hitman (山口組外伝　九州進攻作戦, Yamaguchi-gumi gaiden: Kyushu shinko-sakusen). As many are fond of saying, times have changed and the yakuza must try to change with them or else meet a melancholy end. But as the hero admits, change is something he has no intention of doing even as his old school gangsterism leaves him increasingly at odds with the corporatising ways of the contemporary yakuza. 

The change in the times is obvious from the film’s opening sequence set in 1957 in which an attempt is made on the life of petty boss Ishino (Tatsuo Umemiya) by a gunman who shouts “die, for the good of the world” before firing a pistol and running away. Ishino has been targeted in a dispute over construction rights connected with the regeneration of hot springs resort, Beppu. The hit seems to have been ordered by rival gang, Sakaguchi (Eizo Kitamura), the leader of which is also a prominent local politician who is content to abuse his power for his own financial gain. So confident is he in his safety, that Sakaguchi even gets the police involved rather than deal with it himself. 

Ginji (Bunta Sugawara) has been Ishino’s sworn brother since their teenage delinquent days and determines to get revenge by raiding the Sakaguchi offices and killing one of their high ranking officers. Seeing as he’s already wanted by the police for a previous murder, Ishino sends Ginji to Osaka to lay low while working for an associate, Daito, mainly as a debt collector. It’s this act of separation which introduces a rift between the two men. While Ginji waits patiently to be recalled, Ishino climbs the ranks of corporatised gangsterism by learning to play by the new rules. 

To fill the void, Ginji takes on a new “brother” or perhaps surrogate son in the wayward Ken (Tsunehiko Watase) whom he first meets cheating at pachinko at a parlour where his pregnant wife Fusako (Mayumi Nagisa) is working. It’s Ken who first drags him into a brewing turf war as Korean gang Soryu threaten to disrupt the local equilibrium not least by selling drugs of which Ginji does not approve. Ginji “saves” Ken from joining Soryu by essentially making him his one of his guys though he doesn’t really have much of a position in Daito’s gang, offering him a sense of grown-up responsibility by handing him a pistol with the only the instruction to make sure he shoots with two hands. Unfortunately, Ken will follow his advice but otherwise ends up almost causing an incident with another gang by shooting a man who disrespected him in the street. Ginji marches straight down there to sort things out, but on arrival discovers an arrangement has already been made with his boss which further strains his sense of pride and confidence in his position as a yakuza.

Ginji feels something similar on being invited to a party to celebrate Ishino’s promotion only to be seated with the lowly footsoldiers and ignored by Ishino all night. Ishino rejects him still further in agreeing to plan to send him back to Kyushu out of the way hoping that his old school hotheadedness can finally be tempered. Others meanwhile voice concern that Ginji may have forged a relationship with rival Kobe gangs during the 18 months he abruptly disappeared from Osaka and has only come back to cause trouble. Ginji perhaps knows that he has no more future in the contemporary society, others remarking that seems like someone who is in a sense already dead for having accepted that he will die and most likely in Hakata, the town he had wanted to conquer with Ishino who had crushed his dreams in his newfound pragmatism by calmly explaining that they would never have the power to take it. 

Koji Takada’s screenplay positions Ginji’s gradual decline as an allegory for the yakuza himself while citing the new legislation that this particular series of incidents made necessary creating the new offence of assembly with dangerous weapons as a decisive moment in weakening the yakuza as an institution. Ginji remains a man displaced by his times unable to move forward into a new society in the way that Ishino has but stuck in a permanently post-war mentality despite the constant reminders that “times have changed”. Yamashita adopts the trappings of the jisturoku drama with frequent references to real life events and narrative voiceover but otherwise maintains his classicist formalism while ending on a note of ambivalence that tells us a certain kind of justice may have been served but the cycle of violence may not yet be completed.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Criminal Woman: Killing Melody (前科おんな殺し節, Atsushi Mihori, 1973)

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“Five women like us could take on the whole world!” a woman exclaims after a very successful mission of revenge in which they didn’t have to do very much at all except play on male pride and yakuza honour. Criminal Woman: Killing Melody (前科おんな殺し節, Zenka onna: Koroshi-bushi) stars the two main players of Toei’s pinky violence line, Reiko Ike and Miki Sugimoto, and plays with their star rivalry by casting them as a pair of women eventually divided by the conflicting loyalties presented by the heroine’s desire for revenge. 

Ike stars as Maki, an intense young woman first seen hiding behind a door in the classic club scene that opens the film. Eventually she darts inside and slashes some yakuza with a knife, but her assassination attempt is very unsuccessful landing her in prison for a number of years where she largely spends her time glaring at the bars and plotting her revenge. Nevertheless, it’s the solidarity she finds with her cellmates that eventually allows her to carry out her plan. On her arrival, she first clashes with cell boss Masayo (Miki Sugimoto), a former yakuza moll inside for slashing some guys with a razor after they caught her cheating at hanafuda, but eventually wins her respect after a prison test of strength in which each woman is armed with a glass shard and grips a rope between their teeth until the loser gives in and lets go. Maki is not a skilled fighter and easily wounded by Masayo but refuses to surrender, getting right back up again every time Masayo knocks her down until Masayo finally concedes defeat.

The early prison fight is repeated at the end of the film only without the rope and with real knives, drugs replacing the white chalk that clouded around them as they fought in the prison yard. This time they are more evenly matched. Maki is no good with a knife, but more than able to hold her own and the fight is more about settling a score than it is about revenge so neither really wants to harm the other anyway. Though they found themselves temporarily on opposing sides, inevitably it turns out that Masayo is the woman of the yakuza Maki is trying to bring down, the sense of solidarity between them as women eventually wins out and though Masayo is unable to betray Oba (Ryoji Hayama) she cannot betray Maki either and ends up helping in her in quest for revenge if in a round about way.

It’s this sense of solidarity that brings the other cell mates back to the prison when Maki is released already having decided to help her get her revenge on the yakuza who forced her father to traffic drugs and then had him killed. Maki first refuses their help, as she had the opportunity of getting legal justice by telling the police everything that had happened including her own gang rape at the hands of the same yakuza, because it’s important that she’s the one who takes down Oba but later accepts their gesture and forms a tightly knit gang of her own fronted out of former sex worker Kaoru’s (Yumiko Katayama) bar. To fund the mission, Maki goes on a two week sex work spree mostly bedding American servicemen with whom she later makes a deal to buy a large number of guns and grenades she eventually sells to hotheaded yakuza son Tetsu (Takeo Chii) who is already resentful towards Oba for having stolen his father’s turf.

All Maki has to do to is light the touch paper on a simmering gang war between old school yakuza and the amoral corporatising Oba. She antagonises him by expertly offing one of his guys in a rain drenched assassination scene and getting one of the other girls to strongly hint it was Tetsu’s doing, then pretending to come to Tetsu’s rescue with the guns only to further provoke Oba. The girls even joke they’re doing a public service by cleaning up the town in taking out the corrupt politician who was propping up Oba for his own financial gain. It’s all expertly planned by Maki who appears in a series of quite stunning power suits and sporting giant hair, battling yakuza with killer style and an expert understanding of the way their brains work. But the reason the plan succeeds is the shared sense of solidarity between the women, Masayo included, as they strike back together against an oppressive and patriarchal society.

An Outlaw (ならず者, Teruo Ishii, 1964)

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Outside of Japan, “king of cult” Teruo Ishii is most closely associated with a particular brand of transgressive ero-guro exploitation films such as Horrors of Malformed Men, yet his career was much more eclectic than many might assume. Starring Ken Takakura with whom Ishii was developing a professional relationship which would eventually lead to the hugely successful Abashiri Prison series, 1964’s An Outlaw (ならず者, Narazumono) is one of a string of noir thrillers from the earlier part of Ishii’s career this one taking place mainly in Hong Kong and Macao. 

China-based Japanese hitman Nanjo (Ken Takakura) runs into trouble after he offs a man he assumed to be “the biggest thug in the underworld” but actually turns out to have been a law enforcement official working against a people trafficking ring. To make matters worse when Nanjo returns to his hotel where he was supposed to get his pay off, he discovers the body of a young woman in his bed who is later identified as the official’s daughter. Understandably annoyed, Nanjo starts trying to track down the people who hired him to figure out what’s going but is accidentally dragged into underworld intrigue after being mistaken for a drug deal middle-man owing to the yellow flower he’s wearing on his lapel. 

Like any good noir hero and especially one played by Takakura, Nanjo is basically a good guy with a strong sense of justice and an acute moral compass. He doesn’t like having been manipulated into killing someone who wasn’t in the game nor does he approve of those who make their living by exploiting women such as arch villain Mao (Toru Abe) whom he discovers to have been running a nefarious international trafficking ring getting Japanese women hooked on drugs, shipping them to Hong Kong and Macao, and working them to death before abandoning them once they’ve served their purpose. Then again, he also has a strange problem with women who like to lie in bed in the middle of the day which seems slightly puritanical for a man who kills for a living yet you’d have to admit no one could call him lazy. 

Not much of Nanjo’s past is revealed save that he was born in prison to a woman who stabbed her former partner because he left her for another woman while she was pregnant with his child, raising her son to be anything but dishonest especially with women. In any case, he appears to have been based in China and Hong Kong for some time, claiming that he came down from Xiamen for the job and speaking fairly fluent Cantonese and Mandarin though in another strange coincidence many of the people he meets turn out to be Japanese. In this there’s a slightly ironic inversion of the normal patterning of post-war crime films which sees Japan exporting crime to China the big mcguffin revolving around a tin of drugs Nanjo was given by mistake intended for the local market while the secondary target becomes Mao’s people trafficking operation bringing sex workers who’ve gotten into his bad books to Hong Kong or to be used for the pleasure of wealthy men. Despite his apparent disapproval, Nanjo reveals he was given part payment for the job in the form of a girl who he could use for his “convenience” though it seems unlikely that he did so.

On the other hand, the secondary villain, the Japanese-speaking Minran (Yoko Mihara), is painted as something of a femme fatale playing off Nanjo and her boss while trying to get her hands on the drugs to split the proceeds with her Cantonese-speaking lover who accidentally kills a young girl Nanjo had befriended in Hong Kong. The girl’s death is in part Nanjo’s responsibility in that he placed her in danger without warning or an understanding of what he was asking her to do, yet he later proves no better when he kills the landlady of the hotel who had watched as she died and then blackmailed Minran for financial gain. Aside from the girl and her Japanese friend Aki (Yoko Minamida) who is dying of consumption after being worked to death as one of Mao’s trafficked women, and a detective with whom Nanjo later forms an unexpected alliance, Nanjo is the representative of humanist morality despite his morally compromised existence reminding Mao that his mistake was in thinking that there is nothing money could not buy in rejecting his efforts to pay him off. 

Shot largely on location in Hong Kong and Macao, Ishii adds to the noirish tone with frequent voice over and a melancholy jazz score while making full use of the atmospheric environment with its deserted alleyways and cobbled streets not to mention the naturally canted angles of the Victoria Peak funicular, while there is a fair amount of lowkey sleaze more typical of his later career along with a bizarre scene in which Nanjo sucks out blood from the mouth of a woman suffering a pulmonary haemorrhage. First and foremost a fatalistic noir thriller in which the hero, unfairly damned by a corrupt society, is unable to outrun his past transgressions, An Outlaw nevertheless suggests that true nobility is to be found only in those existing outside of its borders.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsdrZ6eMou0

Inferno of Torture (徳川いれずみ師：責め地獄, Teruo Ishii, 1969)

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“There’s no hope for us anymore” cries the hero, redeeming himself with one last act of humanity before allowing himself to be consumed by the flames of Edo-era barbarity. Another tale of feudal exploitation, Teruo Ishii’s Inferno of Torture (徳川いれずみ師：責め地獄, Tokugawa Irezumi-shi: Seme Jigoku) opens with an otherwise unrelated scene of female crucifixion followed by an elaborate beheading, presenting both of these events with a degree of historical authenticity they do not perhaps possess. Nevertheless, his central tale which turns out to be less about two women than two men, turns on the exploitation of female bodies, subtly suggesting that the modern society is itself founded on female exploitation. 

Though dropping the portmanteau structure frequently employed in the Joys of Torture series, Ishii returns from the prologue with the end of the first arc in which the presumed heroine, Yumi (Yumiko Katayama), makes a stealthy visit to a ghostly cemetery in which she trashes the grave of a man named Genzo (Shinichiro Hayashi), digs him up and dismembers his body to retrieve a key we later see him swallow which she hopes will unlock her womanhood currently imprisoned by an ornate chastity belt, only the key doesn’t fit. 

Flashing back again, we see Yumi forced into sex work in payment of a debt and imprisoned in a labyrinthine brothel which specialises in bondage and torture under the guidance of lesbian madam Oryu* (Mieko Fujimoto) and her samurai fixer Samejima (Haruo Tanaka). The brothel’s USP is in its tattooed women which neatly leads us into the main narrative as Yumi’s body becomes a battleground contested by two men, top tattoo artists in search of the perfect canvas in order to win, ironically, the hand of their master’s pure and innocent daughter Osuzu (Masumi Tachibana). 

Horihide (Teruo Yoshida) and Osuzu are in love, but the dark and brooding Horitatsu (Asao Koike) is determined to frustrate his rival’s desires by becoming the successor to Osuzu’s dying father, the tattooist Horigoro. The “hori” which prefixes each of the men’s names relates to the process of tattooing and comes from the verb to chisel, hinting at the way they prick and channel their desires into the canvas which is human skin. Horihide is our “hero”, described by Horigoro as the light to Horitatsu’s dark, Horitatsu currently making more of an impact with his designs of violent intensity, but each of them is in a very real way content to use and exploit the bodies of women without their full consent in order to practice their art. It is essentially an act of violence if not of “torture”. 

Meanwhile, Oryu and Samejima are profiting off their “merchandise” more directly in participating in the trafficking of tattooed ladies to lecherous foreigners displaying an early fetishisation of Asian women. This being late Edo, Japan is still in its isolationist period in which fraternising with foreigners was illegal which is why the action eventually takes us to Nagasaki and the Dutch trading port of Dejima, here presented as a nexus of corruption, where Samejima and Oryu prove themselves very much in league with foreign powers dealing with powerful businessman Clayton (Yusuf Hoffman), despite his name apparently a Dutchman, and his Chinese associates. Like Nikkatsu’s borderless action films of the ‘50s and ‘60s, Inferno of Torture indulges in an unpleasant Sinophobia which culminates in a chase through a crowded Chinese wet market in which we catch sight of dogs hanging bound ready for the slaughter in similar poses to those of the women in the brothel, not to mention thrusting snakes, before being confronted by a basket full of adorable puppies presumably headed for a dark destination, while we finally rediscover Hidetatsu collapsed in an opium den after being forcibly addicted by Oryu as a means of control. 

“This is a house of horrors” the Chinese gang leader tells a group of women bought by Samejima from a prison and promised a life of wealth and ease as geisha catering to high class clients. It’s difficult to tell if Ishii is critiquing Edo-era misogyny or that of the present day, or merely revelling in it with increasingly perverse scenes of sexual violence and degradation which continually imply that women have no role or value outside of reflecting the desires of men while those who try to claim their own agency are brutally put down by an inherently misogynistic, patriarchal society. After a Count of Monte Cristo-esque subplot in which Horihide is framed for murder but escapes to plot his revenge, the psychedelic final showdown returns us to the tattooists’ artistic face off as they again weaponise female bodies to embody their own ambitions, Horihide turning a blameless young woman into an iridescent peacock to get back at her father. Nevertheless, he finally reassumes his humanity in ending his mission of vengeance before it takes more innocent lives while accepting that he may now be too corrupted to return to his former life. Elegantly composed often unconsciously recalling the keyhole in Yumi’s chastity belt as it imprisons women within the peephole of the frame, Inferno of Torture ends exactly as it began, with a scene of grim and ironic punishment in which the female form is itself obliterated. 

Inferno of Torture is available on blu-ray from Arrow Video in a set which also includes an in-depth commentary from Tom Mes discussing the treatment of the various actresses involved with the series, Ishii, and Toei in general; Jasper Sharp’s Miskatonic lecture Erotic Grotesque Nonsense & the Foundations of Japan’s Cult Counterculture; and a booklet featuring new writing by Chris D.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

*This character’s name is rendered as “Oryu” in the subtitles but “Otatsu” (different ways of reading the same character which means “dragon”) in the accompanying booklet.

Yakuza Law (やくざ刑罰史　私刑!, Teruo Ishii, 1969)

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yakuza law posterOne of the things that (supposedly) separates the “yakuza” from regular thugs is that they have a “code”. That code means many and various things, but in their grand mission to justify their existence it often means that they stand up for the little guy, all too often oppressed by the powers that be. Of course, a lot of people might feel themselves to be oppressed by yakuza thugs who like to throw their weight around and generally cause trouble for small business holders, but that’s beside the point. Teruo Ishii’s Yakuza Law (やくざ刑罰史　私刑!, Yakuza Keibatsushi: Lynch!) goes one step further and asks if the yakuza are themselves “oppressed” by their own code, or at least the various ways it is used and subverted by all who subscribe to it.

Set in three distinct time periods, Yakuza Law is also fairly unique in that the vast majority of those on the receiving end of its violence are male. The yakuza is an extremely homosocial world after all. Each of the three tales presented is preceded by a title card featuring the particular “laws” the unhappy gangsters are about to break and what kind of punishment they might expect for doing so.

The first and earliest, set in the Edo era, is a typical giri/ninjo tale that places the ideal of the yakuza code against the need to preserve a personal vision of justice. The “rules” here are that a yakuza does not steal and he does not fool around with married women. Our hero, Tsune (Bunta Sugawara), takes the heat for a nervous underling, Shinkichi (Hiroshi Miyauchi), who crumbled in the heat of battle, but incurs the wrath of his boss while a devious footsoldier, Viper (Renji Ishibashi), hides in the bushes and then stabs a corpse numerous times to make it look as if he’s done good service. Viper, not content with his ill-gotten gains, sets up Tsune and his superior Tomozo (Ryutaro Otomo) by implicating them in a gambling scam while Tsune falls for the boss’ girl Oren (Yoshiko Fujita) who is also desperately trying to protect the feckless Shinkichi.

The problem with all of this, it would seem, is not so much that the yakuza “law” has been broken but that’s it’s being misused in all quarters and is clearly in conflict with basic humanity. The boss uses the code to manipulate his underlings and keep a firm grip on his power, while Viper bends it to his own nefarious ways and a third underling, Shohei (Shhinichiro Hayashi), rests on the sidelines playing a little each way but remaining loyal to his brothers even as the axe falls on his head. The punishments meted out are suitably gruesome, escalating from finger cutting to eye gauging and ear removal in a senseless and counterproductive lust for violence which does eventually blow back on the boss who pushes his authority too far over too small a cause.

In tale two, however, which takes place in 20th century pre-war Japan, the “crime” is causing trouble and the punishment exile, but again the problem is not the code but the men who subvert it. Thus, hotheaded foot soldier Ogata (Minoru Oki) sets the cat amongst the pigeons by starting a gang war on his own and is sent to prison for three years during which time his gang prospers because of the movement he started. Even so, they aren’t keen to have him back when he gets out and immediately exile him from their territory. He sticks around waiting for his girl, Sayo (Masumi Tachibana), but she gets picked up by the evil boss who wants her for himself and delays her departure so that Ogata can be captured. Believing he’s dead, she hooks up with another goodhearted yakuza, Amamiya (Toyozo Yamamoto), who saves her from the bad guys only to have a romantic crisis when Ogata suddenly resurfaces. Amamiya and Ogata are, however, both “good” yakuza which means they both really love Sayo and want the best for her, each respecting the other for the old love and the new as they team up to kick the corrupt yakuza out of town and make sure she’s permanently safe whoever it is she eventually ends up with.

By the third tale we’ve reached the contemporary era, but we’re no longer in a traditional “yakuza” world so much as one seemingly ripped from a spy spoof in which the cardinal rule is that if you undermine the organisation you will be eliminated. More thugs than yakuza, this kind have no code and will stoop to the lowest kind of cruelty solely for money. Debonair, 007-esque international hitman Hirose (Teruo Yoshida) accepts a job from shady gangster Shimazu (Takashi Fujiki) to assassinate his boss, only Shimazu offs him first and then frames Hirose (which he finds very irritating). Hirose spends the rest of the picture teaching him a lesson while Shimazu tries to eliminate his competition in increasingly inhuman ways (including having someone crushed into a cube while trapped inside a luxury car).

Bar the third episode which isn’t really even about “yakuza”, what Ishii seems to be saying is that the yakuza are also oppressed because they are forced to live with fragmented integrity, torn between giri and ninjo in their adherence to an arcane set of values which are often overly enforced at the cost of true “justice”. To be fair, that is the idea behind every other yakuza film, but Ishii does is add a more cynical edge in suggesting the issue isn’t the code and conflicting value systems but individualised corruption (which is itself perhaps a kind of “ninjo”) in those who deliberately misuse the “noble” idea of the code for their own ends – something which has intensified since the Edo era though is apparently not a result of post-Meiji internationalism. All of that aside, despite the brutality of the title, Yakuza Law is fairly tame outing for Ishii which tempers its lust for blood with cartoonish irony as its deluded heroes battle themselves in service of a code which has never and will never truly serve them.

Available on blu-ray from Arrow Video in a set which also includes a new audio commentary by Jasper Sharp and a vintage interview with Teruo Ishii, as well as a booklet featuring new writing by Tom Mes.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Orgies of Edo (残酷異常虐待物語　元禄女系図, Teruo Ishii, 1969)

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Orgies of Edo poster“Pinky Violence” is a strangely contrary genre, often held up both as intensely misogynistic but also proto-feminist in its vast selection of vengeful heroines who seemed to embody the rage of several centuries of inescapable oppression. Teruo Ishii, at the very forefront of Toei’s attempts to graft pink film sensibilities onto its house style of manly yakuza drama, had a definite love for the perverse but, perhaps unusually, a consciousness of the implications of his world of surrealist violence. The Japanese title of Orgies of Edo (残酷異常虐待物語　元禄女系図, Zankoku Ijo Gyakutai Monogatari: Genroku Onna Keizu) translates as something like “a genealogy of the women of the Genroku Era” and concerns itself with three tales of misused women each of whom meets a grim end at the hands of faithless men who seem to embody the decadence of their prosperous times.

Ishii’s three tales of increasing madness and brutality travel from the streets to the palace in locating each scene of mounting debauchery within the shifting circles of prosperous Genroku era Edo. Our guide, positioned to the side of each of the tales, is a conservative doctor (Teruo Yoshida) who diagnoses his society as morally sick and hovering on the edge of a decadent abyss. Tellingly, each of episodes with which he becomes involved is presaged by his inability to access foreign knowledge in the wilfully isolated nation, slowly stagnating even in the midst of unprecedented prosperity.

His first patient is a young woman in the middle of a painful miscarriage caused by a beating intended to end her pregnancy. Abroad they know of an operation to avoid this sort of misery, the doctor muses, but he has no way of helping her. The young woman, Oito (Masumi Tachibana), like many in the tales of old Edo, got into debt and then was seduced by a handsome young man who posed as a saviour but only ever meant to misuse her. Hanji (Toyozo Yamamoto), a gangster, presses her into prostitution and eventually betrays her by taking up with another woman but neither of them are free of their respective captors be they the Yoshiwara or the gangster underworld.

The doctor’s second case is more extreme and calls upon him to make use of his knowledge of the Western notion of psychiatry in trying to cure a young noblewoman of her perverse fetish for the physically deformed. Ochise’s (Mitsuko Aoi) tastes stem back to a traumatic teenage incident during which she was abducted, held prisoner, and repeatedly raped by a man with a ruined face. Her loyal servant, Chokichi (Akira Ishihama), has long been in love with her but the pair remain locked in a one sided sadomasochistic relationship in which he knows that she can never return his love not because of their class difference, but because of his “perfection”. Pinching an ending from Tanizaki’s Shunkinsho, Ishii sends the frustrated lovers in a less positive direction in which a woman’s defiant insistence on pursuing her own desires is met only by the violence of a male need for possession which eventually leads to mutual destruction.

Mutual destruction is a final destination of sorts. The doctor’s third unrealisable request is for an untimely caesarian section – another piece of Western medical knowledge he has only vague awareness of. This unusual situation unfolds at the court of a lascivious lord whose perverse proclivities are quickly becoming the talk of the town. Drawn to a young woman, Omitsu (Miki Obana), who greets his attempt to fire his arrows at her while angry bulls with flaming horns charge at his other concubines with excitement, the lord is dismayed to hear of another of his ladies, Okon (Yukie Kagawa), enjoying the attentions of her pet dog and therefore somehow sullying his own bedroom reputation. The lord has Okon painted gold and thrown in a hall of mirrors for a slow and painful death of multiplied suffocations but she wins a temporary reprieve by promising to introduce him to untold pleasure if only he lets her live. This will all end in flames and ashes, but the lord hardly cares because it is only the natural end for his hedonistic endeavours.

The doctor performs his miracle and emerges with a child in whom lies the legacy of this immoral time. Yet the doctor wants to “save” it. Even if it’s a “beast” the child is innocent, he intones, insisting that he must live despite this burden in order to resist the madness. Like the strange butoh inspired performance art which opens the film, these are times of madness and confusion in which women, most of all, suffer at the hands of men who care only for their own pleasure. The doctor tries to cure the “sickness of the soul” that he sees before him, but knows that cannot be excised so much as tempered. Still he walks forward, away from the wreckage, with the future in his arms and resolves to live whatever the cost may be.

Orgies of Edo is available on blu-ray courtesy of Arrow Films.

Original trailer (no subtitles)