Tag: Takuya Nishioka

Neo Chinpira: Zoom Goes the Bullet (ネオ チンピラ 鉄砲玉ぴゅ～, Banmei Takahashi, 1990)

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In the classic yazkua films of old, going to prison for the gang could be a badge of honour and one of the ways you could catapult yourself into the higher ranks. By the 1990s, however, the yakuza is a much depleted force and it seems few are willing to give up years of their lives on a point of honour for an uncertain reward. At least, that’s how it is for most of the gangsters at the centre of Banmei Takahashi’s Neo Chinpira: Zoom Goes the Bullet (ネオ チンピラ 鉄砲玉ぴゅ～, Neo Chinpira: Teppodama Pyu) , a slacker comedy in which a young hanger on faces a dilemma when he’s made the lookout on a squad sent to bump off a rival only for his squamates go to great lengths to injure themselves first so they won’t have to go through with it.

Junko (Sho Aikawa) is an unlikely hero. With a rockabilly quiff and a red jacket, he’s nominally the driver for gangster Yoshikawa (Toru Minegishi) which means he gets to drive his limo and act like a big man for a while making calls on his carphone. But as much as Junko shows off to his girlfriend Noriko, a hostess at a Korean bar, by instructing the landlady not to clear up his empty bottles because they’ll make a good weapon in an emergency, he’s otherwise something of a joke. The limo ends up getting “stolen” by a young woman who just likes American cars and sexually aroused by gunfire.

Even Yumeko (Chikako Aoyama) chuckles that Junko sounds like a girl when he says he wants to see the ocean while they’re driving around. “Junko” is ordinarily a girl’s name. He picked it up as a kind of hazing based on an alternate reading of his name kanji. She says the same thing again when he reveals he’s never brought a girl back to his place before, probably because it’s in a disused building he was given to manage where he’s surrounded by junk like an old barber’s chair and pinball machine while the figure of Humphrey Bogart in the Maltese Falcon looks down at him from a poster as if embodying his unattainable gangster dreams. As masculine icons go, Junko is also plagued by his uncle, Mizuta (Joe Shishido), a legendary gangster and representative of old school yakuza who take the code seriously and wouldn’t put up with people like Junko’s colleagues who engage in “zooming”, deliberately shooting themselves to get out of being ordered to carry out a hit. He’s not overly impressed by Junko either, unable to understand why he’d become an errand boy for a petty gangster rather than be his own boss as a small-time crook.

Junko’s dilemma is whether he’s really up to this task and will be to go through with it or will end up chickening out and injuring himself too. Crows are more cowardly than they seem, Yumeko explains in an obvious allegory for the yakuza. They pick a place and defend it as a group, while their numbers are way up lately so their individual turfs are shrinking. But now Junko’s all on his own and filled with uncertainty not knowing if he can pass this rite of passage and be accorded a man or will forever be trapped in a liminal space of adolescence never to be taken seriously or make any progress in his life. In an effort to toughen up, he swaps his red jacket for a suit and finally puts on a shiny leather overcoat, ripping off the buttons to bind it more tightly around him with the belt as if it were a kind of armour. 

Somehow the lighthearted ridiculousness of this world of bumbling yakuza and creepy corrupt cops lends an additional poignancy to Junko’s final gesture as he sets off on his path, not really believing he will return. He doesn’t even wait for the pictures he had taken at a photo booth. They won’t be much use to him where he’s going, but at the same time it’s like he’s treading water never quite getting closer to his destination but continuing along his long sad walk. Banmei Takahashi sticks firmly to his pink film roots, sticking in a weird sex scene at regular intervals as Yumeko becomes enraptured by pistols, but also has quite a lot of fun with his “uncool” gangsters and the lost young man who looks up to them while perhaps knowing that this image of stone cold masculinity only really exists in the movies.

Mermaid Legend (人魚伝説, Toshiharu Ikeda, 1984)

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“Even if someone kills you, you wouldn’t die,” a drunken husband somewhat sarcastically replies having pledged to come back and haunt his wife if he died and she married a man who didn’t drink. His words take on a prophetic quality given that the heroine of Toshiharu Ikeda’s Mermaid Legend (人魚伝説, Ningyo Densetsu) takes on a quasi-supernatural quality as an embodiment of nature’s revenge after someone tries, and fails, to kill her having already killed her husband for witnessing their murder of another man who’d tried to resist their plans of buying up half the town to build a nuclear plant. 

By the mid-1980s, Japan’s economy had fully recovered from post-war privation and was heading into an era of unprecedented prosperity which is to say that the coming of a power plant was not welcomed with the same degree of hope and excitement as it may have been in the 1950s when it was sold not only as a new source of employment for moribund small towns but an engine that would fuel the new post-war society. Several industrial scandals such as the Minamata disease had indeed left those in rural areas fearful of the consequences of entering a faustian pact with big business, which is one reason why the guys from Kinki Electric Power sell it as an amusement park project though even this has the locals wary not just of the disruption it will bring to their lives and potential ruin of their livelihoods which are dependent on the protection of the natural environment but that what is promised simply won’t be delivered. Fisherman Keisuke (Jun Eto) says as much when lamenting a previous aquaculture programme which didn’t pan out and caused lasting damage to marine life. 

In any case, as others say there’s no money in going out to sea anymore and its clear that the old-fashioned, traditional way of life practiced by Keisuke and his newlywed wife Migiwa (Mari Shirato) is no longer sustainable. Migiwa is an abalone diver working without modern equipment but using heavy weights to dive deep enough to reach the shells. As such she’s dependent on her husband to pull her back up to the boat when she tugs the rope. She must put her life entirely in his hands though in truth, he does not seem to take his responsibility all that seriously. The couple bicker relentlessly and not even she really believes him when he says he witnessed a murder which might be understandable given the extent of his drinking. All of which is further evidence against her when she manages to escape from the assassination plot and runs straight to the nearest policeman who thanks her for turning herself in implying he believes she is responsible for Keisuke’s death. 

The possible collusion of the policeman hints as a further sense of distrust in authority which has become far too close to corporate interests. Shady industrialist Miyamoto (Yoshiro Aoki) ropes in both the mayor and the head of the fishing association in his talks with Kinki Electric Power along with Shimogawa from the local tourist board who evidently opposes the plans as he is the man Keisuke witnesses being murdered. As Miyamoto says “sometimes your hands get a little dirty” though he never “directly” involves himself matters such as these. The situation is complicated by an unresolved love triangle between Miyamoto’s spineless son Shohei (Kentaro Shimizu), a sometime photographer, who is resentful of Keisuke and in love with Migiwa complaining that Keisuke always outdrinks him and gets the girl too hinting at his sense of wounded masculinity. Isolated by his class difference, he appears not to approve of his father’s actions but later does little to stop them and eventually sides with corporate interest over his feelings for Migiwa who in any case seems to have become more attached to Keisuke following his death which she vows to avenge. 

There is there is something quite strange in the prophetical quality of Keisuke’s words also predicting the “black sweat” of the Jizo on the beach and the mystical storm which does eventually sweep everything clean destroying the signs for the new nuclear power plant already installed on the beach. In this way, Migiwa becomes a vengeful force of nature taking up arms against those who wilfully ravage and pollute the natural environment while damaging the lives of those who lived on its shores such as herself and Keisuke. She takes revenge not only for the murder of her husband by corrupt capitalists but against that corruption itself even as she laments that “no matter how many I kill, they just keep coming.” “Don’t worry, maybe all this was just a dream,” Keisuke once again prophetically intones though it’s difficult to know if it’s defeating the capitalist order that is a fantasy or the maintenance of the idealised rural life to which Migiwa seemingly finds her way back swimming into an unpolluted sea surrounded by the floating barrels of ama divers and clear blue skies, a creature of nature once again.

Mermaid Legend screened as part of this year’s JAPAN CUTS.

Empire of Kids (ガキ帝国, Kazuyuki Izutsu, 1981)

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Empire of Kids posterJapan in 1981 was a vastly different place than the Japan of 1967. Rising economic prosperity had produced an amiable social calm in which desire for conventional success and increasingly aspirational consumerism had replaced the firebrand need for social change which had defined the previous decade. Filmmaker, film critic, and sometimes outspoken TV personality Kazuyuki Izutsu was presumedly not a huge fan of consumerism and for this, his first “mainstream” film made for ATG, retreats back to the Osaka of 1967 in which petty street punks lamented their lack of opportunities by banding together and battling for control of their respective neighbourhoods like boys in the schoolyard only armed with knives and filled with nihilistic desperation.

The film opens with our “hero”, Ryu (Shinsuke Shimada), being released from juvie after presumably getting into trouble for his petty punk antics. Waiting for him are his two best friends – soulful zainichi Korean Ken (Cho Bang-ho), and rockabilly Chabo (Ryusuke Matsumoto). Ryu is released alongside another boy, Ko (Takeshi Masu), whom he tries to recruit into their mini gang but quickly becomes an enemy, teaming up with the boys’ rivals – the Hokushin Alliance, while also becoming a potential rival for Ryu’s old girlfriend with dancing dreams, Kyoko (Megumi Sanuki). The boys, still in their last year of high school, become obsessed with trouncing their competition, proving their manhood on the streets while asserting their rightful place as the dominant forces in their native area, but as it increases in intensity the game becomes frighteningly serious and its dangers all too apparent.

Izutsu’s film fits comfortably into the “delinquent” genre but perhaps takes its cues from the Hollywood cinema of alienation more than the tough guy antics of the youth movie past. From Chabo’s bright red jacket and neatly greased quiff, the starting point is Rebel Without a Cause as these otherwise not too bad kids struggle with their place in the world, unable to see a clear path and direction for themselves in the society of 1967 which seemed both frustratingly open and closed to unremarkable lower middle-class boys. Ryu’s brother is going to give up football to go to cram school so he doesn’t end up like Ryu, while Ryu has taken to reading brain training books to try and get back on the academic path to success which he fears may have already passed him by. Ken, idly talking of the future, can’t see much beyond winding up in the yakuza, opening a bowling alley, or maybe becoming a comedian (this is Osaka after all). None of these guys is going to university or getting a salaryman job, they know not much awaits them outside of low-paid manual work, marriage, children, family and death, so they take their frustrations out on each other playing at gangsterism out on the streets.

For Ryu, Ken, and Chabo the reasons for their violence are “honourable” – they want to keep their local space local and are committed to defending it from the “external” threat of the shadier street punks from uptown. Apparently from stable economic backgrounds, the boys’ acts of street justice have no particular economic component, in contrast to those of the Hokushin Alliance which positions itself as a yakuza training school with a brutal hazing regime for new recruits and a business plan which involves hunting young women and trapping them through rape and blackmail to force them into prostitution. 

Aside from lack of direction, Ken – the most introspective of the boys, also has to deal with the constant threat of discrimination due to his roots as an ethnic Korean living in Japan. One of the reasons he hates the Hokushin Alliance and distrusts some of the other gangs is that they deliberately target Koreans in racially motivated attacks. One of his old friends, Zeni (Masaaki Namura), is a member of an all Korean street gang which attempts to defend itself against the strong anti-Korean sentiment out on the streets but finds itself outgunned by the sheer weight of numbers. Ken speaks Korean openly with his friends (even when there are non-Koreans close-by) and has no interest in hiding his ethnic identity even if he uses his Japanese name in his every day life, while Ko (whom we later realise is also ethnically Korean) hides his ethnicity completely and subsumes himself into the Hokushin with a view to finally joining the yakuza even whilst knowing that the gangs he has joined are extremely prejudiced against “foreigners” and Koreans in particular. Ken would never out someone deliberately, but finds Ko’s attitude difficult to stomach, not only in his willingness to hide his roots to fit in with gangster thugs, but in his willingness to persecute his own in order to do it.

The atmosphere that surrounds the boys is one of intense futility. They fight each other pointlessly, like children in the playground, and it’s all fun and games until someone reaches for a knife. Petty disputes quickly escalate when the yakuza gets itself involved in children’s games – an assault rifle, after all, has little place in a kids’ disco where teenagers come to drink Coca Cola and slow dance to a terrible covers band singing the “uncool” music of the day. Despite the melancholy air of frustration and inevitability, Empire of Kids (ガキ帝国, Gaki Teikoku) adopts the otherwise warm and nostalgic tone of the Japanese teen movie, embracing the typically Osakan need for spiky comedy even as our guys fall ever deeper into the hole their society has cut out for them. There are few rays of sunshine to be found here, friendships are broken, trusts betrayed, and futures ruined but then again, that was only life, in Osaka, in 1967.

P. P. Rider (ションベンライダー, Shinji Somai, 1983)

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PP rider poster

Despite a brief resurgence following a retrospective at Tokyo Filmex followed by another at Edinburgh International Film Festival, Shinji Somai remains frustratingly underrepresented in the West. Though his career is more varied than most give him credit for, encompassing the melancholy pink film Love Hotel and masculinity drama The Catch among others, Somai is justifiably most closely associated with his youth films. Running from the artier Typhoon Club and The Friends to the rabidly populist in the Kadokawa idol movies Sailor Suit and Machine Gun and Tokyo Heaven, Somai’s work is unique in managing to catch hold of a zeitgeist, capturing the essence of the contemporary teenager more or less in the way they saw themselves rather than the way they were generally seen by adults. Like many Japanese teen movies of the ‘80s, the world of P.P. Rider (ションベンライダー, Shonben Rider) is essentially a safe one. Our three protagonists get themselves mixed up in some dark and shady business but they are never afraid, do not lose heart, and face danger with only contempt and determination.

Somai opens with one of his trademark long takes which whirls around from two suspicious looking yakuza types to a bunch of kids playing around in the school swimming pool. One of the kids, a rotund boy who goes by the nickname Debunaga (his full name being Nobunaga (like the historical tyrant) Deguchi, ‘Debu” essentially meaning “fat”) is being a bit of a twit and having a go at one of our heroes, JoJo (Masatoshi Nagase). Debunaga (Yoshikazu Suzuki) then tries to “drown” JoJo’s friend Jisho (lit. “Dictionary”) (Shinobu Sakagami), before the third member of the trio arrives, an androgynous girl who goes by the name of Bruce (Michiko Kawai). Bruce neatly dispatches the petty high school punks while a teacher, Arane (Hideko Hara), attempts to shift some bosozoku bikers who’ve invaded school property.

Meanwhile, the petty yakuza get on with their plan. They’ve come to kidnap Debunaga, his pharmacist dad apparently has a sideline in drug dealing, but before they can grab him, Debunaga is kidnapped by entirely different kidnappers! Our three heroes, JoJo, Jisho, and Bruce are very annoyed about this because they didn’t get a proper chance to get even with him. Accordingly, they decide the best way to make use of their summer holiday is to rescue Debunaga themselves and make sure they get their revenge before the kidnappers do him in.

P.P. Rider means exactly you think it means, except it doesn’t quite mean anything at all aside from perfectly capturing the strange mix of childish jokes and serious crime that defines the movie’s tone. The atmosphere is absurd and ironic, the kids distrust adult authority and attempt to define their own nascent personalities by effectively rejecting them by using nicknames, dressing in highly codified ways, and either conforming to or subverting social codes as they see fit. Amusingly enough, the trio take a brief pause in the middle of their quest to get haircuts and change outfits, after which they emerge dressed in each other’s clothes as if implying they are almost interchangeable. 

In keeping with most Japanese youth dramas, parents are an entirely off screen presence. Adult input comes from two very different directions (plus the occasional interventions of bumbling beat cop Tanaka), a down-at-heels yakuza called Gombei (Tatsuya Fuji), and the kids’ teacher, Arane. Gombei, a drug-addled gangster, is hardly an ideal role model (especially when he tries to drown Bruce and attacks Jisho with a samurai sword), but he does eventually take the kids under his wing with JoJo picking up the classic deputy role in learning the yakuza ropes. Arane, by contrast begins by letting them down. Harried by the bosozoku she tells the kids to buzz off when they try to talk to her, telling them that she’s off to hot springs town Atami and they’d best come back next term. Nevertheless she eventually becomes an integral part of their group, assisting in the quest and helping to rescue Debunaga while the strange finale plays out before her impassive eyes.

The kids didn’t really want to save Debunaga, and are conflicted when they eventually locate him, but in the end it’s friendship which wins out as they each celebrate their various roles in the successful rescue whilst lamenting the relative lack of care they’ve received from adults and authority figures aside from Arane and Gombei. Absurdist and ironic, P.P. Rider is a strange children’s odyssey in which the adolescent teens head out on a dark and dangerous adventure but live in the relative safety of the world and so nothing very bad is going to happen to them despite the terrible things they eventually witness. Classical long takes jostle alongside Somai’s mobile camera, random intertitles, and frequent breaks for pop music (this is an idol movie after all) in a frenzy of post-modern gags but somehow it all just works, and does so with wit and charm.

Opening scene (no subtitles)

Interview with actor Masatoshi Nagase from the Tokyo Filmex screening in 2011 (Japanese only, no subtitles)

Michiko Kawai’s main titles song – Watashi, Takanna Koro