Tag: Sen Okaji

The Fort of Death (五人の賞金稼ぎ, Eiichi Kudo, 1969)

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Shikoro Ichibei (Tomisaburo Wakayama) returns yet this time seemingly on the opposite side in the second in the Bounty Hunter series, The Fort of Death (五人の賞金稼ぎ, Gonin no Shokin Kasegi) this time directed by Eiichi Kudo. If the first film had been an Edo-era take on James Bond, the second is very much Spaghetti Western and feudal tragedy as Ichibei finds himself coming to, if not quite the rescue of the oppressed farmers, then at least moral support in taking stand against corrupt and self-interested lords.

This might be surprising in that in the first film Ichibei had been a shogunate spy and seemingly close friend of the man himself, yet this time around he’s working as a doctor while taking bounty hunter jobs to earn extra money to support the poor people who come to him for help. Like a true western hero, he has a small posse which includes the ninja lady, Kagero (Tomoko Mayama), from the first film only she’s being played by the actress who previously starred as his other love interest. In any case, he’s approached by a young man from a small village which is making a last-ditch appeal to the local lord to lower their tax burdens so they don’t all starve, though so far the lord’s response has been to add additional taxes and kill people for not paying them. 

On his arrival, Ichibei soon realises that the man who recommended him was actually the leader of the government forces during a previous peasant uprising at which Ichibei had also tried to help the farmers. In that case, Bessho (Shin Tokudaiji) had won, but it didn’t do him any good. His clan was dissolved and he became a wanderer, taken in by the village and now indebted to them, hoping Ichibei can help but fully aware of the brutality with which such challenges to the feudal order are put down. 

The lord later suggests it’s not really his fault. He has to curry favour with Edo to protect the domain, which is why he agreed to participate in a construction project that led him to confiscate all of his farmers’ rice and wheat. But then it’s also true that he is vain, and cruel. On realising the village has hired a man like Ichibei, some of the retainers suggest reopening negotiations but others complain that they must now crush the farmers or face ruin themselves while trying to ensure the strife in their domain does not come to the attention of the government in Edo. 

Part of their problem is that Ichibei simply has better technology in the form of gatling guns. Tying into the western themes, Ichibei is well versed in the use of firearms, while the samurai are mostly reliant on traditional weaponry such as arrows and swords. The lord later insists on using some canons, but is oblivious to the risk as the shogun has banned the use of gunpowder and using them may end up bringing him to his attention and thereby landing him in a lot of possible fatal trouble. 

In any case, it’s the villagers who suffer. Ichibei encounters a woman who has lost her mind, refusing to give up her baby who has died of malnutrition while her husband was executed for non payment of taxes. Meanwhile, some of the other ronin they hired attempt to rape a villager, and a young couple are prevented from marrying because the headman is worried that it would send the wrong message in a time so much strife. Then again, a woman basically attempts to rape Ichibei, descending on him while he’s still asleep which otherwise leads into a fairly comic sequence in which Ichibei must fight of a bunch of ninjas intent on stealing the gatling gun while dressed only his underwear.

Darkly comic it may be, but also surprisingly violent with a ninja at one point using a dead body as a Molotov cocktail not to mention the severed heads and limbs of the battle scenes. Ichibei is fully aware that the battle is a forlorn hope, but also that the villagers have no choice and perhaps this is better for them than simply accepting their fate and starving to death. Even so, he reserves his final words for the Edo inspector who arrives only when the battle is done to survey the scene, berating him that he ought to know what happened here from looking at the battlefield and deducing that this domain has not been run particularly well. It’s a tragedy of feudalism that provokes a tearful rage from the compassionate bounty hunter trying his best to heal the sickness in his society, though perhaps like the patient who visits him with a venereal complaint concluding the best solution is to cut it right off.

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.

Wicked Priest (極悪坊主, Kiyoshi Saeki, 1968)

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A bunch of corrupt monks get a lesson in business ethics from one of their own in the aptly titled Wicked Priest (極悪坊主, Gokuaku Bozu). The first in a series of five films starring Tomisaburo Wakayama as a rogue Buddhist monk who enjoys fighting, drinking, and women but deep down has a powerful sense of moral righteousness, Wicked Priest is in its own way another take on classic ninkyo only this time it’s temples acting like yakuza clans rather than actual gangsters with “wicked priest” Shinkai the ironic symbol of nobility. 

Set in early Taisho, the film opens with a prologue set five years before the main action in which Shinkai breaks up a fight between another violent monk, Ryotatsu (an incredibly gaunt Bunta Sugawara), and some yakuza he challenged while they were hassling a young man for supposedly messing with the wrong girl. Predictably, it’s Shinkai who ends up in trouble. Relieved of his duties, he’s exiled to another temple and sentenced to spend a whole year in isolation thinking about what he’s done. Five years later we can see that the conclusion he’s mostly come to is that the religious world is full of hypocrisy anyway and he might as well live his life to the full while he can.

Indeed, the opening scene sees him ironically reciting a sutra with his head between a woman’s legs and preparing to drink holy water from her belly button. The problem here seems to be one of inter-temple politics that sees Shinkai hassled by officious monk Gyotoku (Hosei Komatsu) who objects to Shinkai’s behaviour and to the leniency which is shown to him by head priest Donen (Kenjiro Ishiyama). Of course Gyotoku is later discovered to be the source of corruption, wanting to depose Donen and take control of the temple in part to facilitate a sex ring he’s running that involves live peep shows literally on temple grounds. Shinkai, meanwhile, has a particular dislike for abusers of women and especially for pimps eventually rescuing some of the women indentured by a local brothel and unfairly kept on after redeeming their contracts with bogus loans, and starting a women’s refuge in the temple where they can find “honest” work and eventually lead “normal lives” as farmers or waitresses free of the abuse and oppression they faced in the “hell” of indentured sex work.

Wandering around the town, he saves one young woman newly arrived in Tokyo from falling victim to a scam and being forced into sex work by getting her a waitressing job at a local restaurant. To keep her safe, he jokes with the cafe owner that he’s already slept with her which in the bro codes of the time makes her his woman and owing to his famously violent nature no one else is going to bother her. For what it’s worth, women young and old come to admire him greatly for his gallantry though he never abuses his position. All of his sex partners are at least of his own age and fully consenting even if he is not exactly faithful in love. 

Meanwhile there’s some minor commentary more familiar from post-war gangster films that sees the temple as a refuge for orphaned men. The fatherless Shinkai finds a beneficent paternal authority in Donen and is, he says, “reformed”, if living to a code that seems to be mostly his own but informed by a kind of moral righteousness not found in others at the temple. Having discovered that a wayward young man Shinkai is attempting to save from his life of petty crime exploiting women for his own gain is a son he never knew existed, Donen would have left the temple to fulfil his familial role but is prevented from doing so by the intrusion of temple politics. Unless undertaking specific vows, Buddhist priests are not necessarily expected to practice celibacy and are permitted to marry yet Donen’s father objected to his choice of bride and she left not wanting to disrupt his temple career. Shinkai entrusts the boy to Donen, talking him into accepting a new paternal authority as a means of returning him to the “proper” path while himself swearing that he will leave the temple in order to ensure justice is served against the true “wicked priest” Gyotoku. Directed by ninkyo specialist Kiyoshi Saeki, the film ends in an outburst of bloody violence as Shinkai takes revenge on institutional corruption but once again leaves its hero a lonely wanderer in an unjust world.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Samurai Wolf (牙狼之介, Hideo Gosha, 1966)

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A cheerful ronin with strong moral fibre finds himself squaring off against a nihilistic assassin and a corrupt retainer/postmaster in Hideo Gosha’s new wave chambara Samurai Wolf (牙狼之介, Kiba Okaminosuke). Where many jidaigeki of the age would follow the antagonist Sanai (Ryohei Uchida), Gosha’s focusses on the figure of a man with wolfish appetites who is otherwise unaffected by the infinite corruption of the world around him and in that at least unwilling to submit himself to the dog-eat-dog mentality of late Edo-era society. 

Wandering samurai Kiba Okaminosuke (Isao Natsuyagi) explains that he got his name because often he bares his fangs and is known as the Furious Wolf, yet as much as the ferocity of the opening titles might bear that image out he is not cruel or avaricious but measured and honest. After wolfing down an exorbitant amount of food prepared by an old woman at a way station, he announces that he can’t pay. The old woman panics and we wonder if he might become violent or even kill her, but Kiba simply offers to pay in kind fixing the old lady’s leaky roof and chopping a supply of wood much to her surprise and gratitude. It seems, the wolf always pays his way. While there, he witnesses a trio of bandits attack a postal cart and kill the men who were pulling it. He retrieves the bodies along with a runaway horse and takes them back to the outpost they came from but the guard there is disinterested claiming that, as they died on the road and not in the town, it’s not his business. As Kiba soon discovers, the guard is in league with a corrupt lord, Nizaemon (Tatsuo Endo), who is an official messenger for the shogun but wants to take over the public postal service which is why he’s terrorising the postmistress, Chise (Hiroko Sakuramachi), with the intention of getting his hands on the relay outpost. 

There is something a little ironic in the fact that Ochise is blind while Nizaemon’s chief assassin is deaf and mute, both of them excluded from mainstream society and looking for support but finding it in opposing directions. Formerly a samurai woman, Ochise wants to hang on to the outpost because it has become her place to belong while resenting the incursion by corrupt lord Nizaemon who only wants it for the potential to control the cargo route along with raising the rates to use it to exorbitant heights. Shortly after Kiba tries to take out the assassins, a bunch of government inspectors turn up to complain about the missing merchandise while backing Chise into a corner by forcing her to accept the liability for transporting a large sum of gold coins. Kiba originally says he won’t help because he doesn’t want to risk his life for people he doesn’t even know, but of course later agrees in part on the promise of a significant return but also because he likes Chise and resents the kind of corruption men like Nizaemon represent.

On the other hand, his humanity is mirrored in his antagonist, hired gun Sanai who fetches up to help Nizaemon stop Kiba and take over the outpost. Sanai cynically tells him, that in five years’ time Kiba will be no better than he is, if he doesn’t kill him first. Kiba rejects the claim but it’s easy enough to see how someone could be corrupted by the realities of Edo-era society. Sanai later reveals that he fell in love with a samurai woman and eloped with her, a fierce taboo given the class difference between them, and later fell into his present state of nihilistic despair when she was taken from him quite literally betrayed by the social order. But Kiba seems different. He is not naive and has no expectations of human goodness yet remains cheerful and in his own way honest. When a young woman comes to him with her life savings and tells him that Sanai is the man whom she’s been waiting for to gain her revenge, he tells her to keep her money because he’s going to end up fighting him anyway. Likewise, when he realises someone he trusted has betrayed him, he tells them that he understands why they did it and bears them no ill will it’s simply the way things are only he suspects they will regret that others have died because of it. Even in his final confrontation with Sanai, he notices that his opponent is injured and ties one of his own hands to his belt to ensure it will be a fair fight. 

In any case, it seems that Sanai’s morally compromised existence is about to catch up to him with several other players intent on taking his life aside from the sex worker who longed to avenge the deaths of her family murdered during a massacre of peasants killed for standing up to a cruel landowner. A female gang leader also wants revenge for the death for her boss, while the cynical madam at the local brothel offers to team up with him to steal the gold from under Nizaemon’s nose. It seems that Sanai is a man already dead, having long abandoned the lovelorn boy he was for the nihilistic existence of a wandering assassin only to be confronted with the ghosts of the unattainable past. This world is indeed rotten, but Kiba has somehow managed to rise above it embracing his wolfish appetites in more positive ways while opposing injustice wherever he finds it. Much more avant-garde than much of his later work would be, Gosha makes great use of slow motion and silence broken only by the reverberating sound of clashing swords and hints at the meaninglessness of a life of violence in an agonisingly haunting death scene in which a bloodstained man turns and falls as if the air were suddenly leaving his body. In the end all Kiba can do is turn and walk away, on to the next crisis on the highways of a lawless society.

Samurai Wolf opens at New York’s Metrograph on Dec. 26 as part of Hideo Gosha x 3

Original trailer (English subtitles)

The Yakuza Papers Vol. 3: Proxy War (仁義なき戦い: 代理戦争, Kinji Fukasaku, 1973)

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3-Battles-Without-Honor-and-Humanity-3-Proxy-WarThree films into The Yakuza Papers or Battles Without Honour and Humanity series, Fukasaku slackens the place slightly and brings us a little more intrigue and behind the scenes machinations rather than the wholesale carnage of the first two films. In Proxy War we move on in terms of time period and region following Shozo Hirono into the ’60s where he’s still a petty yakuza, but his fortunes have improved slightly.

It’s now 1960 – almost 15 years since Hirono came home from the war. The young people who are just coming of age grew up in the turbulent post-war era but probably don’t remember much of the conflict itself. These days the problem is the ANPO treaty and the wider world’s pre-occupation with communism. Russia and America are engaged in various “proxy wars” across the world in what would come to be known as the cold war. This tactic of indirect warfare has also taken root in the yakuza world as gangs and gang members form covert alliances, hatch secret plots to take out rivals, or otherwise try to manipulate the situation to their advantage. When the head of the Muraoka crime syndicate is assassinated in broad daylight and his underling, Uchimoto, does nothing, it kickstarts a chain of petty vendettas as each of the ambitious crime bosses vie to fill the power vacuum with the snivelling Uchimoto not least among them.

Bunta Sugawara returns to centre stage again with Hirono at the forefront of the action. One of the few yakuza guys who’s pretty happy with his lot and not seeking a higher position he’s in the perfect spot to become a very important player when it comes to supporting other people’s bids for power. Having originally backed Uchimoto he’s at something of a disadvantage following Uchimoto’s cowardly flip-flopping. However, having found himself back under the aegis of former boss Yorimoto, it does afford Hirono the possibility of finally getting revenge against him. Gangs merge several times while fracturing on the inside as the lower bosses try to get their guys in line whlst picking sides as to whom they support in the leadership battles (some with more of an eye on their own futures) but this time the action is a little more cerebral than the audacious violence of the immediate post-war period.

Changing up his style slightly, Fukasaku keeps the overall documentary approach with the news reel voice over relating the salient political and historical details plus the initial captions explaining the names and allegiances of the major players but reduces the freeze frame death announcements. The action is still frenetic with ultra naturalistic handheld camera and occasional strange angles but this time he opts for a muted colour effect in the final shoot out which increases the shocking nature of the scene. Blow for blow there’s less overt violence here though there is a fairly graphic and unpleasant rape scene which feels a little out of place though it does add to Fukasaku’s argument about the nature of aggression.

Once again the ruined the dome looms large over everything, reminding us that this isn’t just a story of gang warfare but a critique of the senselessness of a violent life. As the film says, young men are the first to die when the battles begin but their deaths are never honoured. Like Hiroshima Death Match, Proxy War also leads to the death of a youngster in pointless gang violence – another young man who ended up in the criminal underworld through lack of other options. The futility of the cycle of violence is becoming wearing – as is perhaps the point. One gang boss falls, another rises – only the names have changed. There’s no rest for an honest yakuza like Hirono when the less scrupulous are willing switch allegiance without a second thought. The only victory is staying alive as long as you can.

Proxy War is available on blu-ray in the UK as part of Arrow Video’s Battles Without Honour and Humanity: The Complete Collection box set.