Tag: Takuzo Kawatani

Snake Princess (新蛇姫様　お島千太郎, Tadashi Sawashima, 1965)

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Hibari Misora fights Edo-era corruption once again in another jidaigeki musical adventure from Tadashi Sawashima. Snake Princess (新蛇姫様　お島千太郎, Shin Hebihimesama Oshima Sentaro) sees her doing double duty as a sake-loving stage performer in love with a reluctant revenger, and an austere princess mourning the murder of her confidant and only friend but, as in some of her other films, the resemblance is never remarked upon nor is it any kind of plot point. There isn’t even really a “snake princess”, though snakes and the supernatural do play their part and there is perhaps less space for the derring-do and swashbuckling musical numbers which typically characterise a Hibari picture. 

The film opens with stage performer Oshima (Hibari Misora) waking up from a drunken snooze on a riverbank and realising she’s been left behind by her acting troupe. Running into the mysterious Ittosai (Minoru Oki) on her way, she hurries on to the next town to catch them up while he heads in the opposite direction towards Karasuyama and the Princess Koto (also played by Hibari Misora). Meanwhile, in the town, a rowdy samurai starts a drunken fight in an inn, demanding to drink with the innkeeper’s pretty daughter Suga (Tomoko Ogawa). The innkeeper refuses, offering the excuse that his daughter is at the palace with the princess, but the samurai doesn’t take no for an answer and starts thrashing about with his sword eventually killing the innkeeper for the offence he feels has been caused to him. The innkeeper’s son Sentaro (Yoichi Hayashi), a former pupil of Ittosai, then kills the samurai in revenge and is forced on the run, taken in by the leader of Oshima’s acting troupe, Juzo (Takashi Shimura), who apparently knew his father well. 

What ensues is of course a tale of intrigue and revenge mixed with mild romantic melodrama. Oshima begins to fall for Sentaro, but is warned that he is from a prominent non-samurai family and as such is unlikely to marry a travelling actress, itinerant players then belonging to a kind of underclass which is in part one reason why it is so easy for Sentaro to hide among them. Even so he is also subjugated by the samurai who frequently object to being ordered around by “commoners”, insistent on their privilege the refusal of which is the reason Sentaro’s father had to die. 

Meanwhile,  the Princess Koto is herself oppressed within the feudal system as a female ruling a clan in the absence of her father who has placed her in charge while he remains in the city. While Oshima falls for Sentaro, the relationship between Koto and Suga is perhaps transgressively equally close, Koto describing Suga as the only one she can trust within her own court and plaintively asking her to stay by her side forever. Unfortunately however Suga is murdered by the male court conspirators attempting to wrest power from the princess on her way back with evidence of their smuggling plot after meeting Ittosai on Koto’s behalf. Misled into thinking that Koto had his sister killed, Sentaro plots revenge but on learning the truth asks her why she hasn’t dealt with the wrongdoing among her own retainers, only later realising that even as the leader of the clan she lacks the power to do so and remains in a precarious position. 

Arguably, Oshima has more freedom, fearlessly walking the roads alone, drinking and gambling with the men refusing to abide by traditional social codes though perhaps in some ways permitted to do so precisely because of her position within the entertainer underclass. A further gender reversal sees the fallen Sentaro temporarily resorting to sex work as a host at an inn drinking with a melancholy noblewoman who fully expects to bed him for her five Ryo only for Sentaro to become indignant and throw the money back in her face, much to Oshima’s approval though she later becomes jealous and irritated questioning him if he’s ever done this sort of work before as if it would actually change her feelings for him. While Sentaro is forced into but then rejects the subjugated female role, Oshima chooses the male solution of trying her luck at the gaming tables, occasionally charging into a fight wielding a nearby object such as a handy water bucket. 

The snake theme of the title links back to the supernatural appearances of Suga’s silent ghost, protecting the princess with a wall of serpents when Sentaro plans to attack under the false assumption that she was responsible for his sister’s death. Musical numbers are largely restricted to a lengthy stage performance featuring Oshima and Sentaro’s evolving act utilising several sets and elaborate design while Sawashima ups the game a little from the lower tier Toei norm with varying locations shifting from a set-bound snowscape as Oshima is carted off by local goons, to a shot-on-location set piece as the conspirators take down a spy in the rocky desert. Revenge is eventually taken not only for the murders of Sentaro’s father and sister, but for the samurai transgressions of the Edo era, restoring order by wiping out the bad apples but also allowing Sentaro to free himself from his class-bound destiny and pursue a life, and love, of his choosing regardless of contemporary social codes.

Musical sequences (no subtitles)

Kurutta Yaju (狂った野獣, Sadao Nakajima, 1976)

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Kurutta Yaju dvd coverRobbing a bank is harder than it looks but if it does all go very wrong, escaping by bus is not an ideal solution. Sadao Nakajima is best known for his gritty yakuza movies but Kurutta Yaju ( 狂った野獣, Crazed Beast/Savage Beast Goes Mad) takes him in a slightly different direction with its strangely comic tale of bus hijacking, counter hijacking, inept police, and fretting mothers. If it can go wrong it will go wrong, and for a busload of people in Kyoto one sunny morning, it’s going to be a very strange day indeed.

A young woman receives a phone call at a cafe – the person she’s waiting for is on his way, but the girl seems surprised and irritated to hear he will be arriving via public transport. Meanwhile, ordinary people are seen cheerfully going about their everyday business and boarding a bus headed for Kyoto station while a cool looking man in mac and sunshades clutches a violin case in the back. Suddenly, two shady guys jump on after their bank robbery goes belly up. Trying to escape the police, they threaten the driver with a gun and take the passengers hostage.

This sounds like a serious situation, and it is, but the two bumbling bank robbers haven’t thought any of this through and have no plans other than somehow driving the bus onwards to a land without policemen. Eventually the authorities are made aware of the hijacking but there is another hidden problem – the driver has a heart condition and is supposed to be avoiding “stressful situations”. Neither the bus company or the police has any more idea what to do now than the increasingly panicked criminals and the situation quickly makes its way into the press whereupon the mothers of two little boys presumed to be onboard are forced to dash straight down to the police station to find out exactly what the police are up to as regards rescuing their sons from dangerous criminals.

The atmosphere on the bus is tense but also ripe for comedy as each of these captive passengers gradually reveals an unexpected side of themselves. The “hero”, Shin (Tsunehiko Watase) – the cool looking dude on his way to meet the girl waiting in the cafe, keeps a low profile in the back, hoping this will all blow over. Meanwhile, a woman desperately tries to get off the bus because she’s more worried about missing an appointment than being killed by hijackers, and an adulterous couple on their way back from an illicit visit to a love hotel begin bickering about what will happen if any of this gets into the papers. The two little boys start crying and are comforted by an old lady who takes the time to remind the hijackers that they’re bringing shame on their families as well as exhorting the man next to her who is so engrossed in the racing news that he hasn’t really noticed the hijacking that he ought to be doing something about it. He does, but only gets himself into more trouble whilst further revealing the depths of the highjackers’ ineptitude.

Soon enough the woman from the cafe, Miyoko (Jun Hoshino), jumps on her bike to chase the bus and find out what Shin is playing at. As might be expected, there’s more to Shin than his ice cold exterior, and more to that violin case than a priceless musical instrument. The bus careers onward while the police come up with ever more bizarre attempts to stop it including, at one point, trying to drive right into the side to damage the engine. Bizarre hilarity ensues as a troupe of traditional musicians trolls the hijackers with an impromptu show, a kid pees out the window, and the bus plows straight through a chicken barn like some old time cartoon. Shin becomes the unlikely hero of the hour as he ends up counter hijacking the bus to try and cover up the circumstances which led him to get on in the first place.

Playing out in real time and only 78 minutes in length, Kurutta Yaju is a brilliant mix of absurd comedy and gritty action movie. Shin attempts to ride the situation out, hoping he’ll be able to turn it to his advantage, and, though he plays everything beautifully, eventually becomes disillusioned with what his strange bus odyssey might have cost him. Action packed, hilarious, and ultimately a little bit sad Kurutta Yaju is a lost gem in Toei’s B-movie backlog and another exciting addition to Japan’s long history of bus-centric cinema.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Doberman Cop (ドーベルマン刑事, Kinji Fukasaku, 1977)

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Doberman cop J DVD coverAll things considered, a live pig is a rather insensitive gift to present to your local police station, though any gift at all might be considered in appropriate even if offered by a well meaning colleague keen to help out when a horrific murder may be connected to his missing person case. By 1977 Kinji Fukasaku had made a name for himself through the wildly successful “jitsuroku” or “true record” genre of yakuza movies kickstarted by his own Battles Without Honour and Humanity. Doberman Cop (ドーベルマン刑事, Doberman Deka) is then quite an odd move as its brings him back to the looser, exploitation leaning B-movie action which featured heavily in the earlier part of his career and which the “jitsuroku” movement was set on displacing. Fittingly enough, Doberman Cop also sees Fukasaku reuniting with the frequent star of those early films – Sonny Chiba, now considerably older but still an impressive action star willing to put himself in danger to achieve the heart stopping stunts his fans had come to expect.

Chiba plays Okinawan “crazy cop” Kano, the stranger in town currently on a mission to find a childhood friend at the request of her sickly priestess mother. A body has been discovered, so horribly charred that visual identification is not possible but based on the clues found in the room the police are convinced the woman is Kano’s missing person, Yuna, who had been living as a prostitute under another name. Kano is not convinced, the priestess has conducted rituals which suggest her daughter is alive and there’s something not quite right about this case which the police have attributed to a spate of serial killings targeting prostitutes in the Tokyo area. An encounter with a shady yakuza turned music promoter brings Kano into contact with Miki (Janet Hatta) – an aspiring singer who bears a striking resemblance to the missing Yuna.

Doberman Cop is, loosely, based on the manga by Buronson. Part of the “gekiga” movement which prided itself on gritty, adult stories, Doberman Cop owed much to Dirty Harry with its sarcastic, tough as nails policeman armed with a .44 Magnum and a rock hard desire for justice. Fukasaku’s Kano is reimagined as a genial country bumpkin, a toughened farm boy in a straw hat displaced in the Tokyo jungle. Turning up like a strange relative, Kano has brought along a local delicacy in the form of a live pig he offers to the Tokyo police precinct with the promise that all they need to do is snap its neck and light the barbecue. Unsurprisingly, the city policemen decline his polite offer leaving him trailing the squealing piggy around with him like a burdensome sidekick.

Kano’s Yuna is not the only young woman of Okinawa fetching up in the mainland capital in search of a “better” life, but finding only failure and despair. The country detective alienates the city police with his arcane divinatory ritual which involves tipping out a large bag of small seashells and counting them to ascertain the answer to a binary question, but his methods convince him than Yuna is still alive while another Okinawan woman is dead. That a woman from his island has met such a grim end is of no small regret to Kano, be she Yuna or not, and his quest is one of vengeance for both women ruined by the false promise of city life, tempted from simple village existence by bright lights and urban sophistication.

Miki’s path has followed this pattern to the letter. City life turned her into a prostitute and drug addict, eventually running all the way to New York but failing to escape her ongoing despair. Running into a similarly depressed former yakuza, Hidemori (Hiroki Matsukata), who falls in love with her, reawakens her desire for life, and becomes determined to rescue both of their futures by turning her into a singing star, Miki is at a turning point as she prepares for TV stardom as the winner of a signing competition while Hidemori backtracks to his gangster days to make it happen.

Kano begins to piece things together and comes to realise his worst fears are true. Nevertheless, if he could he’d take Yuna home with him to the village to forget her city ordeal rather than hand her over to the Tokyo police to face justice whatever she might have done. Though the tone is largely a comic one, laced with Fukasaku’s characteristically bleak sense of humour, the conclusion is just as melancholy as any of his other sad stories of broken men as Kano is forced to conclude that whatever the facts, the Yuna who left the village is no longer in this world. Putting a lead on his piggy friend, he resigns himself to leaving the city to take care of itself while he returns home, his mission a failure.

Necessarily less serious than Fukasaku’s other work of the ‘70s, Doberman Cop is a return to the nonsensical B-movie action fests of the past which leaves ample room for Chiba to show off his still potent skills including the famous scene of him abseiling down a tall building to bust into a hotel room where Miki is being held captive by a crazed yakuza. The country bumpkin adapts to this part of city life well enough, karate kicking bad guys and loudly disapproving of drug peddling misogynists (not to mention “righteous” serial killers hellbent on “cleansing” the city of sleaziness). Bonding with the “salt of the earth” residents of the lower class neighbourhoods, including a stripper who takes a fancy to the pig during her routine, and a member a biker gang unfairly hauled in as a suspect, Kano concludes that city life is not all it’s cracked up to be much as he comes to admire these basically “good” people who have gone out of their way to help him for mostly altruistic reasons. Still, the world is a darker place for Kano following his city adventure, and all he can do in the end is return to the relative safety of a sunny Okinawan village, pig in tow.

Available now from Arrow Video!

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Cops vs. Thugs (県警対組織暴力, Kinji Fukasaku, 1975)

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cops vs thugs J BDCops vs Thugs – a battle fraught with friendly fire. Arising from additional research conducted for the first Battles Without Honour and Humanity series and scripted by the author of the first four films, Kazuo Kasahara, Cops vs Thugs (県警対組織暴力, Kenkei tai Soshiki Boryoku) shifts the action west but otherwise remains firmly within the same universe. This is a world of cops and robbers, but like bored little boys everyone seems to forget which side it was they were on – if they truly were on any other side than their own. There are few winners, and losers hit the ground before feeling the humiliation, but the one thing which is clear is that the thin blue line is so thin as to almost be transparent and if you have to choose your defenders, a thug may do as well as a cop.

A dodgy looking guy in a dirty mac roughs up some equally dodgy looking kids. Given that the shady looking fella is played by Bunta Sugawara you’d peg him for a petty thug, but against the odds Kuno is a cop – just one with a taste for crumpled raincoats. The town he’s policing is one in the midst of ongoing gang strife following a series of breakaways and civil wars throughout the ‘50s. Things are coming to a head as rival bosses of the two breakaway factions, Hirotani (Hiroki Matsukata) and Kawade (Mikio Narita), vie for power while a former yakuza politician, Tomoyasu (Nobuo Kaneko), does his best to stir up trouble between them that Kuno is trying to keep from exploding into all out war.

Cops vs Thugs is as cynical as they come but slightly more sympathetic to its desperate, now middle aged men whose youth was wasted in the post-war wasteland. The central tenet of the film is neatly exposed by a drunken gangster who points out that at heart there’s little difference between a cop and a yakuza aside from their choice of uniform. Policemen, like gangsters, follow a code – the law, carry a gun, are fiercely loyal to their brotherhood, and at the mercy of their superiors. Good jobs were hard to come by in the devastation following the surrender, in fact one of the reasons company uniforms became so popular was that no one had decent clothes to wear and a providing a uniform was a small thing that a company could to do increase someone’s sense of wellbeing, community, and engender the feeling of family within a corporate context. The police uniform, even if it’s reduced to a badge and a gun, does something similar, as do a yakuza’s tattoos. They literally say someone has your back and will come running when you’re in trouble.

These drop outs with nowhere left to turn eventually found themselves one side of a line or on the other – the choice may have been arbitrary. Kuno says he became a cop because he wanted to carry a gun, something he could have done either way but for one reason or another he chose authority over misrule. Cops being friends with yakuza sounds counter intuitive, but many of these men grew up alongside each other, attended the same schools, perhaps even have relatives in common.

Both the police and the yakuza claim to be the defenders of honest, working people but neither of them quite means what they say. Police brutality is rife while yakuza battles reach new levels of violent chaos including, at one point, a beheading in the middle of a sunlit street. Yet the greatest threats to the population at large aren’t coming from such obvious sources, they’re hardwired into the system. Sleazy politico Tomoyasu spends his time in hostess bars and schmoozes with gangsters he uses to do his dirty work while the press look on gleefully at having something to report. Kuno may not be a candidate for police officer of the year, but he tells himself that his policy is one of appeasement, and that working with organised crime is the best way to protect the ordinary citizen. When you’re forced to work within a corrupt system, perhaps there is something to be said for flexibility.

For all of the nihilistic cynicism Fukasaku retains his ironic sense of humour, staging a violent, inefficient, and bloody murder in a tiny room where a sweet song about maternal love in which a woman sings of her hopes for the bright future of her son is playing a healthy volume. Corruption defines this world but more than that it’s the legacy of post-war desperation that says on the one hand that it’s every man for himself, but that it’s also necessary to pick a side. Cops, thugs – the distinction is often unimportant. There is sympathy for these men, and sadness for the world that built them, but there’s anger here too for those who play the system for their own ends and are content to see others pay the price for it.

Available now from Arrow Video!

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Originally published by UK Anime Network.

Heat Wave (陽炎, Hideo Gosha, 1991)

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heat-waveHideo Gosha had something of a turbulent career, beginning with a series of films about male chivalry and the way that men work out all their personal issues through violence, but owing to the changing nature of cinematic tastes, he found himself at a loose end towards the end of the ‘70s. Things picked up for him in the ‘80s but the altered times brought with them a slightly different approach as Gosha’s films took on an increasingly female focus in which he reflected on how the themes he explored so fully with his male characters might also affect women. In part prompted by his divorce which apparently gave him the view that women were just as capable of deviousness as men are, and by a renewed relationship with his daughter, Gosha overcame the problem of his chanbara stars ageing beyond his demands of them by allowing his actresses to lead.

Heat Wave (陽炎, Kagero), which was to be the director’s penultimate feature, is a homage to late ‘70s gangster movies with a significant nod to Toei’s Red Peony Gangster series. Set in 1928, the action follows cool as ice professional itinerant gambler Rin Jojima (Kanako Higuchi) whose high stakes life becomes even more complicated when she accidentally runs into her adopted little brother, apparently on the hook to some petty gangsters. Dropping her commitments to help him out of his sticky situation and recover the family restaurant, Rin comes face to face with the yakuza who killed her father in a gambling dispute more than twenty years previously but vengeance is just one of many items on her to do list.

The title Heat Wave was apparently selected for the film to imply that Gosha was back on top form and ready to burn the screen with thrilling action but when producers saw his rushes they knew that their hopes were a little misplaced. Gosha was already seriously ill and was not able to direct with the fire of his youth. Heat Wave is undoubtedly a slow burn as Rin figures out the terrain and designs her campaign with the opposing side coming up with a counter plan, but the gradual acceleration begins to pay off in the film’s elaborate smoke and flames finale as Rin takes a bundle of dynamite to the disputed territory and then fights her way out with sword and pistol aided by an unlikely ally. Downbeat but leaving room for the hoped for sequels, Heat Wave is very much in the mindset of Gosha’s heyday in which, as Rin laments, the good die young and the bad guys win.

In keeping with many gambling films much of the action is taken up with tense games of hanafuda which may prove confusing to the uninitiated and are not particularly engaging in any case, though Gosha does not overly rely on the game to fill the screen. This may be early Showa, but save for the trains the action could almost be taking place a hundred years previously. Rin may have an unusual degree of autonomy as an unmarried woman travelling alone and earning her money through back alley gambling but her world is still a traditional one in which the honour of the game is supposed to matter, even if it is ignored by the unscrupulous who would be prepared to undercut their rivals away from the gaming table by attacking their friends and allies. Rin gains and then loses, reduced to an endgame she never wanted to play and which she fully intends to win by destroying herself only to be saved by her greatest rival.

Gosha’s reputation for vulgarity was not quite unjustified, even if perhaps overstated. Rin apparently inhabits the male world of her profession in a full way as an odd scene in which she’s taken to an inn to watch a live lesbian sex show seems to demonstrate though there is no dramatic purpose to its inclusion save to emphasise Rin’s impassive poise. Though nudity is otherwise kept to a minimum, Rin’s yakuza tattoos are on full show as a clear indication of her position in the underworld. The appearance of such extensive tattooing on female gangsters is a rare sight and Gosha does his best to make the most of its transgressive qualities.

When the producers realised Gosha was not as filled with intensity as they’d hoped, they hatched on the idea of attaching a hard rock song to the end to give the film more edge (apparently much to the consternation of the composer). This might explain the strange entry to the credits sequence which is accompanied by a very up to the minute burst of synthesiser music accompanied by computer graphics loading the faces of the stars across the screen in strips. Perhaps meant to bring the ‘70s inspired action into the present day the sudden entry of the modern world is jarring to say the least though perhaps it kept viewers in their seats long enough to enjoy the post credits sting of Rin giving it her best “you shall perish”, presumably to whet appetites for a sequel. Even if not quite as impressive as some of Gosha’s previous work, Heat Wave makes up for its flaws in its exciting finale which brings all of his choreographical and aesthetic abilities to their zenith as Rin basks in both victory and defeat with the legacy of the good people who took her in burning all around her.

Selection of scenes from the the film (no subtitles)

The Yakuza Papers Vol. 5: Final Episode ( 仁義なき戦い: 完結篇, Kinji Fukasaku, 1974)

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800x1200srAnd so, the saga finally reaches its conclusion. Final Episode (仁義なき戦い: 完結篇, Jingi Naki Tatakai: Kanketsu-hen) brings us ever closer to the contemporary era and picks up in the mid ‘60s where Hirono is still in prison and Takeda, released on a technicality, has decided to move the yakuza into the legit arena. The surviving gangs have united and rebranded themselves as a political group known as the Tensei Coalition. However, not everyone has joined the new gangsters’ union and the enterprise is fragile at best.

Hirono’s sworn brother, Ichioka, is one such antagonist and after the Coalition’s accountant is clumsily gunned down in the street, tempers start to flair. Though the Coalition is nominally headed by Takeda, an up and coming youngster, Matsumura, is winning a lot of respect for his level headed judgement and ability to form long term plans. He wants to move away from the image of the traditional yakuza with their missing fingers and bad attitudes to something a little more media friendly. However, the old guard including the veteran, Otomo (now played by Jo Shishido), aren’t willing to see the bigger picture and continue to behave in the old ways requiring swift and bloody justice for their fallen comrade. The older generation maybe on their way out, but that doesn’t mean they can’t cause a little trouble on their way. Despite the best efforts of the younger guys the cycle of violence seems set to continue, will anything ever change at all?

According to Fukasaku, almost certainly not. Though Matsumura is accounted to be a good guy by both of our “heroes” Hirono and Takeda, his yakuza revolution seems doomed to fail. This kind of coalition is completely pointless if not everybody joins and obviously not everybody is going to. Following the public outcry and subsequent police crackdown in the previous film, the yakuza feel the need to reform their image, keep the violence off the streets and appear generally less scary than the image they’ve hitherto cultivated. Now it suits them to conduct themselves in a more dignified manner, more like regular businessmen than thugs in flashy suits.

Meeting at the prison in the end of Police Tactics, Hirono and Takeda both agree that their era has passed. They still aren’t quite old men, but they aren’t young and this violent world isn’t for them anymore. Their resolutions are both that the general environment has changed making the way they’ve lived so far untenable, but also that if they attempted to live that way again they simply wouldn’t survive any longer (perhaps they are “better off” in jail). Hirono spends most of the movie off screen again, in prison, writing his memoirs. Before coming out he seems set on “retirement” but once released he decides to return to the yakuza world. It’s not until the end of the film when once again confronted by the senseless violence of gang warfare that he finally decides to retire. Matsumura may have been trying to change things, but more young guys are dying so fast there’s barely any point learning their names and what really does it get you in the end? Can you live freely, has the world really changed at all? From Hirono’s late middle age viewpoint, the answer is no.

Final Episode follows the same basic formula as the other films in the series with the narrative voice over, frenetic handheld camera work, captions and freeze frames. The violence may be a little less frequent but appears bolder in its execution. These youngsters are messier than their forebears – the gunning down of the Tensei accountant is a clumsy affair carried out by two amateurs in the middle of a crowded street. Random weapons are constructed with pretty much anything that’s lying around during a street fight. These young guys are a different kind of desperate and have no idea how to conduct themselves in a subdued way.

We’re almost up to the the contemporary era of the film. It’s getting on for 25 years since Hirono came home from the war and joined a different kind of battlefront. Japan’s development has been startlingly rapid – from post-war rubble to hosting the olympic games and a newly burgeoning prosperity. Hirono and those like him have found themselves riding the wrong wave as their fortunes continue to dwindle just as the legitimate world is coming into its own. When Hirono and Takeda were talking at the prison at the end of part four they knew something had come to an end. They had no place in this world anymore – unless you become a ruthless boss like the hated Yamamori (still harbouring dreams of domination well into his dotage), the yakuza life is a young man’s game. Once again we finish on a shot of the ruined dome and a reminder that the strong will always prey on the weak. Fukasaku’s prognosis for the future is grim but, it has to be said, accurate.

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

 

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.

The Yakuza Papers Vol. 2: Hiroshima Death Match (仁義なき戦い: 広島死闘篇, Kinji Fukasaku, 1973)

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81ZkRgBFyyL._SL1378_If you thought the story was over when Hirono walked out on the funeral at the end of Battles Without Honour and Humanity think again – we’ve barely scraped the surface of the post-war Hiroshima criminal underworld chaos. The aptly named Hiroshima Death Match runs in parallel with the events of Battles Without Honour taking place in roughly the same time, 1950-1955, but features a new protagonist relegating Bunta Sugawara’s Hirono to the sidelines where he appears as a weary observer of the cruel yakuza world. This time our hero, Yamanaka, is younger – too young to have offered his life as a kamikaze in the war as he apparently wanted to, and is one of the thousands of young men who’ve found themselves alone and without futures thanks to both the after effects of World War II and the ongoing Korean War.

Hiroshima Death Match ties itself into Battles Without Honour and Humanity quite neatly when the protagonist, Shoji Yamanaka (Kinya Kitaoji), is sent to prison after taking a knife to a room full of guys who accused him of cheating in a gambling den. There he comes into contact with the first film’s hero, Hirono (Bunta Sugawara), who offers him some food whilst in solitary but then disappears for the vast bulk of the film. When he gets out, Shoji finds himself in trouble again when he can’t pay for his meal in a restaurant and offers to work off the bill. The waitress, Yasuko (Meiko Kaji), refuses and tells him to just forget about the money and leave when he’s done but Shoji is insulted by her “charity” and things kick off between him and a gang of yakuza also in the restaurant at the time. Yasuko turns out to be the widowed niece of a yakuza boss and after recovering in her care Shoji agrees to join the Muraoka gang to get revenge on the guys who beat him up.

Whereas Battles Without Honour and Humanity took as its protagonists the young men who’d returned from the war to a ruined and defeated country, Hiroshima Death Match focuses on the generation below who were too young to fight themselves but have still been marked by the after effects of the conflict. At the beginning of the film Shoji has nothing, he’s ashamed of cheating and gets upset when caught which only fuels his youthful and violent anger. He doesn’t seem to have any family to help him or honest work to go to and so, of course, he ends up a yakuza. Once again, the yakuza take the place of a traditional family offering both a place to belong and a degree of emotional and financial support – for a price.

When Shoji inevitably falls in love with Muraoka’s widowed niece, he discovers his surrogate father’s love is not quite unconditional. Yasuko has a young daughter and was married to a man who died a kamikaze war hero. Muraoka does not want her to remarry lest she shame her husband’s memory unless he keeps it in the family by marrying her off against her will to her huband’s brother. Shoji’s affair with Yasuko continues to cause a rift with Muraoka and he’s torn between a desire for a peaceful future with the woman he loves and loyalty to his gang boss to whom he owes so much. Muraoka’s own morals are shown to be far from the traditional yakuza ideals and he’s not above using Shoji’s strained loyalties to his own advantage eventually with tragic consequences.

Like Battles Without Honour and Humanity, Hiroshima Death Match is shot in the same quasi-documentary style with a weary sounding narrative voice over and frequent freeze frame captions identifying the characters along with their gangs and positions as well as their dates of demise at the appropriate time. The ruined Atomic Bomb Dome (now the Hiroshima Peace Memorial) continues to loom large over the proceedings as we’re reminded at the end that this isn’t the only blood that’s been shed here. Even more so than with Battles, Fukasaku rams home the senselessness and futility of violence. The film ends with Hirono attending another funeral (though this time in a black suit and melancholic air) where the bosses reap in consolation money and gamble at the wake. He gives his old bosses a sideways look as they laugh and joke while a young man who they all now account as some kind of legendary yakuza hero lies dead for no reason at all. What does this sort of life amount to in the end? The only reward for a life of violence is a lonely grave.

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

 

The Yakuza Papers Vol. 1: Battles Without Honour and Humanity (仁義なき戦い, Kinji Fukasaku, 1973)

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Snapshot-2015-12-07 at 11_06_36 PM-930280086When it comes to the history of the yakuza movie, there are few titles as important or as influential both in Japan and the wider world than Kinji Fukasaku’s Battles Without Honour and Humanity (仁義なき戦い, Jingi Naki Tatakai). The first in what would become a series of similarly themed movies later known as The Yakuza Papers, Battles without Honour is a radical rebooting of the Japanese gangster movie. The English title is, infact, a literal translation of the Japanese which accounts for the slightly unnatural “and” rather than “or” where the “honour and humanity” are collected in a single Japanese word, “jingi”. Jingi is the ancient moral code by which old-style yakuza had abided and up to now the big studio gangster pictures had all depicted their yakuza as being honourable criminals. However, in Fukasaku’s reimagining of the gangster world this adherence to any kind of conventional morality was yet another casualty of Japan’s wartime defeat.

The story begins with a black and white image of a mushroom cloud with the film’s bright red title card and now famous theme playing over the top. This is Hiroshima in 1946. Things are pretty desperate, the black market is rife and there are US troops everywhere. Shozo Hirono (Bunta Sugawara) has just returned from the war (in fact he’s still in his uniform). He gets himself into trouble when he intervenes as an American soldier attempts to rape a Japanese woman in broad daylight in the middle of a crowded marketplace. He manages to cause enough of a commotion for the woman to escape but the Japanese cops just tell him not to mess with the GIs. Things don’t get much better as one of Hirono’s friends is assaulted by a yakuza. They get some rival yakuza to help them get revenge and in the commotion Hirono accidentally kills someone and is sent to prison for 12 years. In prison he meets another yakuza who wants to escape by pretending to commit harakiri and promises to get his yakuza buddies to bail Hirono out if he helps. From this point on Hirono has become embroiled in the new and dangerous world of the Hiroshima criminal underground.

Battles Without Honour and Humanity has a famously complicated plot entered around the various power shifts and machinations between different groups of yakuza immediately after the end of World War II. The film begins in 1946 and ends in 1956 though many of its cast of tough guys don’t last anywhere near as long. The picture Fukasaku paints of Japan immediately after the war is a bleak one. Even if some of these guys are happy to have survived and finally reached home, they’ve seen and done terrible things. Not only that, they’ve been defeated and now they’re surrounded by foreign troops everywhere who can pretty much do what they want when they want. They just don’t have a lot of options – if they don’t have connections to help them find work when there’s not enough to go around then it isn’t surprising if they eventually fall into to crime. Also, having spent time in the military, the yakuza brotherhood provides a similar kind of camaraderie and surrogate family that you might also find in an army corps.

It all gets ugly quite fast. Largely the yakuza are making their money profiting from the political instability, resenting the US occupation yet reaching deals with them to support their efforts in the Korean war and then selling new and untested drugs at home (with less than brilliant results). Betrayals, executions, assassinations in previously safe places like a bath house or the barbers – these are a long way from the supposedly honourable gangsters of old. One minute Hirono is offering to cut off his finger as a traditional sign of atonement (though no one knows exactly what you’re supposed to do in this situation and it all ends up seeming a little silly) and taking the rap for everyone else’s mistakes, but his friend faked harakiri to get out of jail and everyone is double crossing everyone else whichever way you look.

The whole thing is filmed in an almost documentary style with captions identifying the various characters and giving the exact time of their demise (if necessary) as well as a voice over giving background information about the historical period. The film is inspired by real life yakuza memoirs and there are parts which feel quite like a bunch of old guys sitting in a drinking establishment and recounting some of their exploits.

This new postwar world of heartless gangsters is a tough one and almost devoid of the old honour-bound nobility, however somehow Fukasaku has managed to make it all look very cool at the same time as being totally unappealing. You wouldn’t want to live this way and you definitely don’t want to get involved with any of these guys but somehow their self determined way of life becomes something to be admired. That said, there’s a sadness too – that even in the criminal underworld there used to be something noble that’s been obliterated by the intense trauma of the war. You can rebuild, you can move on from the destruction left by the war’s wake but there’s no going back to those days of “honour and humanity” – if they ever existed, they’re gone forever now.

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