Tag: Naomi Kawashima

The King of Minami: Special Ver.50 (難波金融伝 ミナミの帝王 スペシャル Ver.50 金貸しの掟, Sadaaki Haginiwa, 2004)

Posted on by

More than twenty years after the first instalment, Ginjiro Manda (Riki Takeuchi) is still collecting debts in Minami and busier than ever as a stagnant economy and increasingly amoral form of capitalism begins to take hold on the area. Manda likes to think of himself as an ethical loan shark, though he too charges obscene mounts of interest and is not above using threats and manipulation to get his money back even if he stops short of actual violence. 

Hoping to get restaurant owner Sugawara to pay up at least the interest on his loan, Manda’s associate Shin (Kenta Kiritani) goes to the trouble of hiring a hearse to scare him into honouring his debts, while Manda suggests he kill himself and pay them back with the life insurance money. Once again, Sugawara’s woes appear to be caused by what Manda sees as personal failings such as a gambling addiction and inability to knuckle down and focus on honest work. Nizato, meanwhile, is more a victim of circumstance if also his own poor business acumen and what Manda may see as a weak character in his tendency to continue taking out one loan just to pay another in the mistaken conviction that his business will magically turn around. 

Manda advises him to get a divorce because he married into his wife’s family to take over the factory and could apply for more legitimate business loans under his birth name. Spinelessly, he considers it, until his wife shuts him down. The problem is that both he and Sugawara have is that they can’t look past the present and will do anything just to get the money without thinking about the consequences. That’s one way they’re suckered in by a new network of yakuza-backed loan sharks run by moody gangster Domoto (Daisuke Ryu) who is in a permanent bad mood because ever since his boss died, his widow, Yukino, has been running the show rather than appointing him as the new leader. 

Annoyingly for him, Yukino is actually quite good at leading a yakuza clan and is well respected by the other men with only Domoto complaining. His attitude towards her bears out the misogyny of the surrounding society in which it is assumed women always have ways of making money. Another of Manda’s clients, bar hostess Mayumi, is having trouble paying him back because her clients welch out on their debts. Manda and Shin tell her to do sex work instead because it pays faster, in a tactic not dissimilar from the hearse they hired for Sugawara. Despite agreeing to pay the interest, Mayumi eventually dodges the debt because her yakuza boyfriend Kawatani starts throwing his weight around forcing a confrontation between Manda and the yakuza encroaching on his turf.

Though he may not be actually all that much better, Manda is at least more principled Domoto who is only using his debt collecting business to fuel his illegal organ transplant trade. Scamming desperate people by encouraging them to take out impossible loans and then saddling them with even more through nefarious guarantor schemes, he traps them in debt then forces them to use their organs as collateral. A minor subplot explores the precarious position of organ transplantation in Japan due to cultural notions to do with the nature of death and a fear of exploitation which make such procedures much more difficult than in other areas of the world. Yukino, the defender of old-school yakuza values, doesn’t approve of Domoto’s actions, either aligning her with Manda as a guardian of a down-to-earth working-class Minami rather than those like Domoto who think only of money and their own position.

Then again, Ginjiro does otherwise take on a kind of supernatural quality in his insistence that a debt must always be repaid and he will reclaim his money come hell or high water. Though his primary reason for saving Sugawara and Nizato is that they can’t pay him back if they’re dead, he’s not entirely indifferent to their fate and does try to give sensible financial advice such as it being inadvisable to take out one of his high-interest loans especially if you have several existing debts already. He is, however, still a part of this system and wilfully taking advantage of people’s weakness in the pursuit of riches even if he does have, as he says, a code and his own brand of righteousness no matter how compromised it might otherwise seem to be.

The King of Minami: Ginjiro Manda (難波金融伝 ミナミの帝王1 トイチの萬田銀次郎, Sadaaki Haginiwa, 1992)

Posted on by

“The one holding the money calls the shots,” according to a particularly sticky debtor in Sadaaki Haginiwa’s The King of Minami, though that turns out not quite to be the case. After all, though the money may be in his possession, technically it belongs to Ginjiro (Riki Takeuchi) and when they don’t return it to him, he begins to feel offended. Reflective of a kind of post-bubble malaise, the film has a rather cynical take on money and finance, but at the same time a weird kind of wholesomeness.

Ginjiro may be the King of Minami, but he sees himself as a saviour of the poor. Questioned by new underling Ryuichi, he brushes off concerns that people can be driven to suicide over debt by claiming that the loans he offers may save their lives. But though Ginjiro may claim to be somehow better than his yakuza counterparts in refusing to resort to violence, he’s ruthless in other ways and certain that debts must be repaid. Once he’s cheated by an old man, Tokugawa, who refuses to pay the interest on his loan, Ginjiro knows theres’s no point pressing him and decides to go after his daughter instead. She, however, has already maxed out all her card trying to save her dad’s business. 

For his righteousness, explaining that he’ll never end up with sometime love interest Asako because a loan shark has no room for relationships, Ginjiro’s world is essentially misogynistic. Sent after a runaway bar hostess, Ginjiro tells Ryuichi that women always have ways of making money with a note of envy in his voice as if he resented this essential unfairness on behalf of impoverished men. Of course, this way of making money is open to them too, though they wouldn’t consider it and no one would put it forward as an option or view their body as a commodity that should be traded away when one has debts. He says something similar to Tokunaga’s schoolteacher daughter Machiko too, agreeing that night work is the way to make a lot of money relatively quickly. Machiko has, however, already been forced into sexual slavery by Narita, a rival yakuza loanshark, who extorts sexual favours in lieu of money. 

Young Ryuichi is quite touched by her story and even falls in love with her a little bot despite Ginjiro’s warnings that a loanshark can’t afford to let his emotions overcome his reason. Even if he remains willing to make Machiko pay for her father’s transgressions, Ginjiro is equally angry with Tokunaga for rejecting this essential law that money should always find its way to its point of origin. Taking him to task for his immoral vices such as a gambling addiction that’s ruined his business, finances, and relationships, Ginjiro tells him that he ought to pay his debts himself rather than push them on his daughter. He seems to have contempt for people who do this to themselves through what he sees as their own poor choices, but less so for those like Machiko who end up needing his services through no fault of their own or an ironic sense of indebtedness to someone else.

In any case, he stands a kind of counter to those like Narita who only want to exploit people’s weaknesses and use violence to get their way. The two of them end up in a financial sparring match as Narita sets Girjio up with a deliberately bad debt, while he, in turn, masterminds a counter scam under the tutelage of his “financial teacher” who knows all sorts of underhanded ways to make money like selling land that doesn’t belong to you. One could say that he’s teaching Ryuichi all the wrong lessons, but then his behaviour is more roguish than dangerous and he’s obviously more morally righteous than the sneering Narita who seems to feed off human pain so it’s satisfying to see him win and humiliate the predatory yakuza. Ginjiro agrees that it’s a sad world in which people die over money, but, at the same time, has a healthy disregard for it. He tells Ryuichi that he should think of money in the same as a greengrocer thinks of vegetables and that he needs to lose his reverence for it if he’s to make it as a loanshark. That might, after all, be how he became the king of Minami, laughing at the ridiculousness of a world in which those with money call the shots while simultaneously holding all the cards himself.