Yakuza

Japanese organised crime films, produced mostly by Toei, in two phases that are almost opposites.

Ninkyo eiga: the chivalry films

The first wave, roughly 1963 to 1972, is formal and nostalgic. Set usually in the late Meiji or prewar period, these films are about giri and ninjo, obligation and human feeling, and the tension between them. The hero is a gangster of the old school, bound by codes, opposed by a modern gang with no honour. He endures, and endures, and in the last reel walks alone into a building with a sword.

Ken Takakura is the face of it. The structure is closer to a western or a samurai film than to anything American crime cinema was doing.

Jitsuroku: the true-account films

Then Kinji Fukasaku made Battles Without Honor and Humanity (1973) and the genre could not go back.

Based on the memoirs of a real Hiroshima gangster, it opens with the atomic bomb and treats postwar organised crime as what actually followed from it. There is no honour anywhere in it. Alliances last a scene. The camera is handheld to the point of violence, freeze frames stop the action to caption another anonymous death, and the body count is administrative.

Four sequels followed within two years. The cycle it started ran until the end of the decade.

Why it belongs on this site

Toei was running the yakuza films, the pinky violence films and the exploitation programme out of the same studio, with overlapping crews and cast. Meiko Kaji moved between them. The jitsuroku films were made fast, sold hard, and treated by the industry as product, which is the working definition this site uses.

Where to start

Battles Without Honor and Humanity. If the handheld camera and the twenty named characters lose you in the first twenty minutes, that is a normal response.