Graveyard of Honor
Graveyard of Honor is a 1975 film from Japan, directed by Kinji Fukasaku, running 93 minutes. reelscum files it under yakuza.
- Year
- 1975 · 1970s films
- Country
- Japan
- Runtime
- 93 min
- Director
- Kinji Fukasaku
- Updated
- 29 Oct 2026
- Obscurity
- cult (47/100)
- Also known as
- Graveyard of Honour and Humanity
Defined in the glossary: Yakuza
Fukasaku's nastiest. A gangster too unstable for organised crime.
Kinji Fukasaku's nastiest film, based on the life of a real gangster too unstable for even the yakuza to tolerate. Rikio Ishikawa betrays everyone, including his own bosses, in a downward spiral of drugs and violence that ends the only way it can. There is no honour anywhere in it, which is the point.
Fukasaku shoots it with his usual handheld ferocity, and Tetsuya Watari plays Ishikawa as a man with a genuine death wish. It is the jitsuroku style at its most nihilistic, a portrait of self-destruction with no redemption offered.
Bleak, brutal and one of Fukasaku's most uncompromising films.
Trailer
The numbers
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Where to watch
Legal options in USA
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The cycle in depth
- Meiko Kaji and the art of not blinking
Toei hired her to headline prison quickies. She built the most-copied performance in Japanese genre cinema out of about forty lines of dialogue.
Filed alongside
Battles Without Honor and Humanity
Not pinky violence. Fukasaku's handheld yakuza epic, and a classic.
Cops vs. Thugs
Fukasaku again, arguing the two categories in the title are the same.
Street Mobster
Bunta Sugawara as pure appetite. The jitsuroku style arriving fully formed.
Branded to Kill
Got Suzuki fired from Nikkatsu for making films nobody understood. Correct.
Tokyo Drifter
Suzuki given a budget cut and responding with pop-art abstraction.
Ichi the Killer
Miike hands out sick bags at the premiere and earns every one of them.