Tag: Takuzo Kawatani

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Original trailer (no subtitles)

The Insatiable (現代ポルノ伝 先天性淫婦, Norifumi Suzuki, 1971)

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History repeats itself in Norifumi Suzuki’s erotic drama The Insatiable (現代ポルノ伝 先天性淫婦, Gendai Porno Den: Sentensei Inpu). The film’s Japanese title, Modern Porno Tale: Inherited Sex Mania, better hints at its true intentions in essentially repurposing a sense of class anxiety and moral conservatism as familiar from classic melodrama to fit Toei’s line of erotically charged movies but eventually offers little judgement of the heroine’s surrender to her fate (after gaining her revenge) in putting on her mother’s kimono to follow the path set down for her.

That was not, however, what Yuki’s (Reiko Ike) mother (Yoko Mihara) originally wanted. Hoping to save her from the life of a bar hostess with terrible taste in men, she sent her to a religious boarding school in Tokyo which has given her a toxic sense of shame in her sexuality. Sharing a bed with a classmate, she relates her fear and horror of sleeping with men which she assumes she is expected to do in time, though goes on to explore herself sexually with the other girl who feels much the same despite the warning from their lesson books that looking at another woman with desire is no different from adultery. 

Nevertheless, on returning to her mother’s home in Kyoto Yuki is later raped by her mother’s latest boyfriend who is for some reason a bowling enthusiast. His sensibility is emblematic of that of most men in the film who see Yuki merely as an object to be conquered. Following this violation, Yuki quits school and spends all her time in clubs in Shibuya unable to reconcile herself with her sexuality and living as good time girl if resenting herself when others see her as a sex worker. Sucked into the world of sleazy clubs, she becomes a kind of pass around for wealthy men while also cared for by a besotted yakuza who has been quite literally emasculated by his love for her, leaving Yuki unable to fully return his affections because he can no longer satisfy her sexually.

Eventually she meets handsome architect Yoichiro (Hiroshi Miyauchi) with whom she falls in a more wholesome love, but continues to believe that she cannot really be with him because of her sordid past. She then realises that not only does he have unfinished business with a French woman he met while studying abroad (Sandra Julien), but that his father, Matsumura (Tatsuo Endo), is the seedy loanshark who’s been trying to get his hands on her through middleman Akihito (Fumio Watanabe) who is connected with her mother’s new partner Tomoguchi, and also Yoichiro’s brother-in-law.

Akihito is really the villain of the piece, though mostly for his attempt to wage class warfare by taking over Matsumura’s business. His wife, Ayano (Miwako Onaya), has turned away from him knowing that her father brought him into the family for his ruthlessness while exclaiming that she hates self-made men. In much the same way that Yuki was attempting to escape her mother’s legacy, Akihito is also trying to overcome his impoverished background to catapult himself into the upper classes though Matsumura himself appears to have earned his wealth in dubious ways. In any case, he rejects Yoichiro’s decision to marry Yuki not only because he wants her himself but because he claims he wants to find a more appropriate wife for his son presumably as he found Ayano a husband who would benefit himself. 

In any case, Yuki is drugged and abused much like her mother turned into a plaything for men. Yuki resents her only momentarily for her role in her rape and sickening attempt to placate her boyfriend after having stood up for Yuki and confronted him about his betrayal. The two women later reconcile and find solidarity in their maternal relationship even if her mother can never escape the pattern of behaviour that keeps her dependent on bad men which is something Yuki may have overcome in the film’s closing moments as she in turn, wearing her mother’s kimono, opens a bar under her own name living as an independent woman. 

To get her revenge, she manipulated the men around her by using her sexuality against them only to be backed into a corner by Akihito’s chilling claim that she was now his slave. Her salvation at the hands of another man who damns himself in her defence and the defence of their love as something pure despite having cruelly rejected Yuki as a “whore” perhaps undercuts the message but also in the film’s eyes redeems her from her wandering life as an insatiable sex addict now free of her sense of shame and the lingering trauma of her rape. In this patriarchal and classist society, all men are animals driven only by destructive influences, while Yuki is even able to bond with Yoichiro’s French former lover with whom she also shares a sexual encounter. Suzuki films with characteristically romantic imagery and a wry sense of humour but nevertheless allows his heroine to find her way out of a world of beasts while refusing to shame her even as she embraces her mother’s legacy. 

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

Father of the Kamikaze (ゝ決戦航空隊, Kosaku Yamashita, 1974)

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By the mid-1970s, Japanese cinema at least had become much more comfortable with critiquing the wartime past, considering it from a greater distance than the often raw depictions of war in the films from the previous two decades. 1974’s Father of the Kamikaze (ゝ決戦航空隊, A Kessen Kokutai), however, is among the few to skew towards the nationalist rather than the ambivalence or simple anti-war messages of other similarly themed films of its era. 

Starring ninkyo icon Koji Tsuruta who served in the air force himself, the film is a kind of biopic dedicated to Admiral Onishi who oversaw the kamikaze operations at the end of the war. As is pointed out, Onishi had been against the war in general terms even before its inception and is originally against the philosophy behind the kamikaze squadrons but as Japan’s fortunes continue to decline he becomes its biggest advocate citing a kind of sunk cost fallacy that it would be in someway unfair to the men that have already died to surrender while insisting that suicide missions are the only feasible way to turn the tide because one kamikaze could take out a hundred men by destroying battleships singlehandedly. 

The film in part attributes this extreme solution to the prevailing with your shield or on it philosophy of the contemporary society which placed extreme shame on the act of being taken prisoner. In the prologue that opens the film, a squadron of downed pilots whose heroic deaths have already been recorded is discovered alive in an American prisoner of war camp but as being a prisoner of war is so shameful and would reflect badly on the military, the decision is taken to fix the books by sending the men on a mission from which they are not intended to return. Onishi is opposed to the plan, he asks why they can’t find a way for the men to live, but the decision is already made. In any case, he describes the action of a suicide mission as a “beautiful ideal” even when insisting that a war cannot be fought in that way not least for purely practical reasons in that they do not have the resources to be wilfully sacrificing skilled pilots and their planes. 

Having come round to the idea, however, Onishi is a crazed zealot who cannot accept the idea of surrender and even goes so far as to barge into a cabinet meeting to urge ministers against a truce even though the war is clearly lost. To his mind, the only way to honour the sacrifices of those who’ve died is to fight to the last man. Kozono (Bunta Sugawara), another officer opposed to the kamikaze, eventually meets a similar fate in refusing to obey the order to lay down his arms and ending up in a psychiatric hospital. His objection had partly been that it’s wrong to turn men into ammunition, but also that the kamikaze project is itself defeatist and self-defeating when there are men such as himself who are committed to fighting on.  

In this the film leans into the image of militarism as a death cult in which dying for the emperor is the only noble goal of the whole imperial expansion. In its eventual lionising of Onishi’s image, his bloody suicide atop a white cloth resembling the flag of Japan while his parting words scroll across the screen in text, it does not shy away from his more problematic aspects in which he fails to object to a request from a junior officer that soldiers should be allowed to test their swords on American prisoners of war, roundly telling a subordinate who breaks protocol to insist that such a thing is not only morally wrong but will ruin their international reputation that he has no need to think of consequences because Japan will win this war. He claims to want to find a way of defeat that will satisfy the living and the dead, but in reality cannot accept it not least in that it would entail admitting that he sent 2600 young men to their deaths for nothing. 

Tsuruta brings the same level of pathos to his performance as he did in playing conflicted yakuza stoically committed to a destructive code, but there’s no getting away from the fact that the film focuses mainly on Onishi’s personal suffering as a man who sent other men to die for a mistaken ideal and then could not admit his mistake offering an apology only in his death in which he urged the young people of Japan to work to rebuild the nation in the name of peace. In switching to the present day and showing us Onishi’s dilapidated former residence and in fact the room in which he died with its tattered shoji and peeling paintwork, he veers towards the nationalistic in uncomfortably reinforcing the nobility of his death rather than the folly of war or absurdist tragedy of the kamikaze programme. Adopting a quasi-jitsuroku approach with frequent use of onscreen text, a narratorial voiceover, and stock footage of kamikaze in action Yamashita may portray war as madness in Onishi’s crazed devotion but cannot help depicting it as a “beautiful ideal” even in the undignified violence of Onishi’s ritual suicide. 

Operation Plazma in Osaka (実録外伝 大阪電撃作戦, Sadao Nakajima, 1976)

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The precarious balance of the post-war yakuza society begins to crumble in Sadao Nakajima’s jitsuroku eiga, Operation Plazma in Osaka (実録外伝 大阪電撃作戦, Jitsuroku gaiden: Osaka dengeki sakusen). The Japanese title might more accurately be translated as “shock tactics in Osaka” which is a neat encapsulation of the turf war which arises when a larger gang from Kobe decides to muscle in and take over the city while a small upstart continues to agitate contemplating taking the whole prize for themselves. 

Inspired by a real life turf war which took place in Osaka in 1960, the film opens with classic jitsuroku voiceover revealing that a precarious balance had been held in the local underworld since the Meiji era in part because the city is simply too big to be ruled by any one gang. But times are changing, yakuza conglomerates are in style, and so it is that the Kawada gang mounts a largely political campaign to claim the city without bloodshed, as boss Yamaji (Akira Kobayashi) puts it, by convincing the smaller gangs to join up with them. According to the voiceover, however, it wasn’t Kawada that upset the balance but a small upstart group that came out of nowhere, Soryu. 

The screen then cuts to a map of Osaka, while the stills behind the credits feature the Tsuruhashi Market in Korea town. The thing about the Soryu group is that many of its leading members are ethnically Korean which sets them apart from most of the other mobsters in town. Even so, it’s hotheaded Yasuda (Hiroki Matsukata) that first gets them in trouble by getting into a fight with Takayama (Tsunehiko Watase) at a boxing match after climbing into the ring himself when the guy he bet on looks like he’s about to lose. This sets up a conflict between the Soryu and the Nanbara gang who run the boxing hall, but it never takes off because the recently released Daito suddenly announces that he’s bought the “Dance Hall” the ring is being run from and wants to turn it into a cabaret bar. It seems clear that someone’s backing Daito, but no one quite knows who. 

As Yamaji had said it would be, it starts of as a very modern silent war in which he slowly seduces various yakuza gangs convincing them that they’re stronger together with a slight note of join us or die. Yasuda and Takayama are two men who don’t like being told what to do and each end up exiled from their gangs thanks to their opposition to Kawada. Having failed to assassinate Yamaji, boss Nanbara pathetically rolls over and decides to join him instead while the Soryu gang is sent on the run leaving Yasuda and and Takayama to form an unlikely brotherhood brokered by Yasuda’s odd decision to gift his nightclub singer girlfriend to his sometime rival leaving Takayama permanently in his debt and touched by his selfless gesture.

Even by the standards of the jitsuroku, Operation Plazma in Osaka is rabidly misogynistic and often sleazy with an early scene seeing the Soryu gang cause trouble by stripping a hostess naked as one pours alcohol over her body and another drinks it from between her legs. Naked women are repeatedly fondled by fully clothed men, while nightclub singer Yoshiko (Yuko Katagiri) is treated largely as a pawn, a tool used to mediate the latent homoerotic desire between Yasuda and Takayama. Then again, everything in this world is extreme. The conflicted Miyatake (Tatsuo Umemiya) who had once tried to protect Takayama eventually tries to boil a man alive to get him to reveal Takayama’s location while Nakajima’s anarchic handheld camera desperately tries to keep up with the increasingly nihilistic violence. 

The resolution arrives not with death but total defeat, the traditional yakuza forced into submission by the corporatising giant with the survivors realising they will live the rest of their lives in subjugation making an “unconditional surrender” to changing times. Yasuda had claimed that the Soryu gang was a “free democracy” standing in opposition to the latent fascism of traditional gangsterdom which then finds its way into the corporate and the extreme hostile takeover Yamaji has just performed on the city of Osaka. Suddenly all that’s left of traditional yakuza is a pinkie in a jar, a grim a reminder of what happens when those in a position to resist back down in the face of an authoritarian power.

Yakuza Graveyard (やくざの墓場　くちなしの花, Kinji Fukasaku, 1976)

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“We don’t resort to violence. We observe the law.’ The hero of Kinji Fukasaku’s Yakuza Graveyard (やくざの墓場　くちなしの花, Yakuza no Hakaba: Kuchinashi no Hana) is berated by a superior officer for excessive use of force, but his criticism is in some senses ironic because it is the police force itself which becomes a symbol of the societal violence visited on those who can find no place to belong in the contemporary society. By this time the yakuza was already in decline and in the process of transforming itself into a corporatised entity while as a police chief explains increasing desperation has led to escalating gang tensions. 

Recently transferred maverick cop Kuroiwa (Tetsuya Watari) finds himself caught between two worlds in attempting to enforce the law through methods more familiar to yakuza. Soon after he’s had his gun taken away for exercising excessive force on a suspect he’d been independently tailing in the street on whom he’d found bullets designed to be used with a remodelled toy gun, Kuroiwa is pulled aside by another senior officer, Akama (Nobuo Kaneko) who takes him to a meeting with local yakuza boss Sugi (Takuya Fujioka). It seems obvious that Akama has cultivated a relationship with the Nishida gang which may not be strictly ethical for a law enforcement officer and hopes to bring Kuroiwa on board as a potential asset. They attempt to bribe him in return for information on the Yamashiro clan, the dominant organised crime association in the area, which has been hassling Nishida in an attempt to take over their territory. But Kuroiwa ironically tells them that they should “act like yakuza” and sort out their own problems rather than relying on the police before dramatically walking out much to to the consternation of everyone else present. 

Nevertheless, he eventually comes to sympathise with them as a symbol of the little guy increasingly crushed by corporate and authoritarian forces outside of their control. He finds out from a briefing that the police’s goal is the disbandment of the Nishida gang but when he asks why they aren’t going after the Yamashiro too he’s told to mind his own business and begins to realise that the police are in cahoots with organised crime. Whether they justify themselves that managing the Yamashiro to prevent a turf war is the best way to protect the public or are simply corrupt and in the pocket of big business, Kuroiwa can’t help but balk at the blatant hypocrisy of the law enforcement authorities. 

Later Kuroiwa reveals that he became a police officer after being bullied as a child in order to exert power over his life, or perhaps becoming an oppressor in order to avoid being oppressed. He was bullied because he had been born in Manchuria and even years later remains a displaced person at least on a psychological level. It’s this sense of displacement which allows him to bond with the Nishida gang’s accountant, Keiko (Meiko Kaji), whose father was Korean. Kuroiwa agrees to accompany Keiko to visit her husband (Kenji Imai) who is serving a lengthy prison term in order to tell him that the gang want to promote someone else to a position he viewed as his by right. The husband explodes in rage and uses a word some would regard as a slur to reference Keiko’s Korean heritage while she later attempts to walk into the sea feeling that there really is no place for her in the contemporary society. 

Just as she claims that she is neither Korean nor Japanese or much of anything at all, Kuroiwa is neither cop nor thug and similarly excluded from society at large. He ends up bonding with old school Nishida footsoldier Iwata (Tatsuo Umemiya), who is also ethnically Korean, for many of the same reasons and attempts to mount a doomed rebellion against their mutual oppression, but is hamstrung by his otherness which is only deepened when he’s taken prisoner by loan shark Teramitsu (Kei Sato) and given a mysterious truth drug developed by the nazis later becoming a user of heroin. Already marginalised, forced into crime by economic necessity and social prejudice, Iwata and Keiko like Kuroiwa himself struggle to escape their displacement while pushed still further out by systemic corruption and the amoral capitalism of an era of high prosperity. Shot with jitsuroku-esque realism and characteristically canted angles, Fukasaku injects a note of futility even within the hero’s tragic victory as he quite literally sticks two fingers up to the corrupted “brotherhood” that has already betrayed him.

Yakuza Graveyard is released on blu-ray on 16th May courtesy of Radiance Films. On disc extras include an in-depth appreciation of the film and the work of screenwriter Kazuo Kasahara from Blood of Wolves director Kazuya Shiraishi, and an informative video essay from Tom Mes on the collaborations of Meiko Kaji and Kinji Fukasaku. The limited edition also comes with a 32-page booklet featuring new writing by Miko Ko plus translations of a contemporary review and writing by Kasahara.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

The Pledge (博奕打ち外伝, Kosaku Yamashita, 1972)

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The gangster code slowly consumes series of men each trying to do the right thing but hamstrung by the actions of others in Kosaku Yamashita’s yakuza tragedy, The Pledge (博奕打ち外伝, Bakuchiuchi Gaiden). It is indeed a promise between brothers which damns them all, but the roots of it lie in repressed emotion and a desire to protect other people’s feelings by keeping a destructive secret while trying to satisfy oneself that one has behaved properly even if no one else understands. 

The battleground is Wakamatsu, Kyushu, where outsider Egawa (Koji Tsuruta) has united the local boatmen and is undercutting the prices of a rival gang led by Omuro (Tomisaburo Wakayama). While Omuro is out of town, his right-hand man Taki (Hiroki Matsukata) has decided to take advantage of a minor squabble between some of his guys and Egawa’s to initiate a small scale turf war hoping to take the river back under their control. He does this by kidnapping Egawa’s younger brother Masakazu (Goro Ibuki) to lure him to their headquarters alone, something of which Omuro does not approve on his return but decides to go with as an excuse to bring his rivalry with Egawa to a head. Just as the pair are squaring off, a mutual friend, Hanai (Ken Takakura), arrives and intervenes convincing the two men to lay down their arms for the moment at least.

It could be argued that it is this interrupted fight that is resolved in the film’s conclusion if only by inexorable fate. In a repeated motif, Omuro keeps to the code and is exasperated and disapproving of Taki’s underhanded tactics but accepts the responsibility for them himself knowing that Taki acted only on his behalf and his recklessness is only an expression of his love for him. There is indeed something homoerotic in the relationship between the two men as Omuro cradles a wounded Taki and attempts to comfort him that the fault is all his own, while resolving to accept Taki’s actions and build on them rather than try to deescalate or try to apologise. 

The real crisis occurs when the boss, approaching 60 which represents the full circle of a life, decides to name Omuro as a successor rather than the anticipated Hanai. Hanai stoically accepts though intending to leave the gang and travel to another part of Japan but other members of the clan are perplexed, little understanding the boss’ decision in feeling that Omuro is not of good character whereas Hanai is easily the better choice. As it transpires, the boss has made his decision deliberately in order to mitigate the fact that Hanai is secretly his illegitimate son whose origins he has kept secret in deference to his legal wife. He chooses not to name him as a successor in order to avoid causing him problems in his later life while justifying himself that he has not made the decision for dynastic reasons or out of simple favouritism. Yet the relationship between the two men, father and son, is raw and painful if founded on a deep understanding that leaves them unable to meet each other directly with emotional honesty. 

Because of his father’s decision, Hanai forces Egawa to promise that he will not antagonise Omuro which leads to problems in his own gang with his men angry and confused, unable to understand why Egawa is letting Omuro walk all over him. Compounding the problem, Egawa’s errant brother Tetsu (Bunta Sugawara) returns unexpectedly and as Egawa cannot tell him about the pledge without disclosing Hanai’s secret, thinks his brother is being messed around and raids Omuro’s offices to reclaim money he had extorted from Egawa. He learns the truth from devoted geisha Hideko (Yuko Hama) who is deeply in love with Egawa yet largely unable to act on it again because of the gangster code while pledging that she’d sooner die and prove her devotion to him than summit herself to Taki, who is also in love with her, even when he threatens her with a knife. 

The yakuza code dictates that Omuro must die though he is little more than a passive antagonist all too willing to accept the evil deeds that Taki did on his behalf because of the code of loyalty though he would not have dared to do them himself. Secrecy and repressed emotion drag all into a dark web of self-destructive violence until reaching their inevitable conclusion and perhaps bringing one cycle to a close if only in the birth of another. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

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.