Yakuza

Yakuza films are 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.

Before the codes

Silent-era films often cast the bakuto, the gamblers who preceded the modern yakuza, as lonely Robin Hood outlaws, and the real figure Kunisada Chuji was a popular subject. Wartime propaganda killed that off. The critic Mark Schilling names Akira Kurosawa's Drunken Angel (1948) as the first film about postwar yakuza, though it ignores the genre's later conventions. By the 1960s Nikkatsu was making modern gangster pictures under the "Borderless Action" label, the Wataridori series among them, until it fired Seijun Suzuki after Branded to Kill (1967). Toei made the chivalry films.

After the boom

Yakuza films shrank in the 1980s, partly because of the VCR. Toei's V-Cinema line, from 1989, put low-budget direct-to-video gokudo films in front of young directors, and Takashi Miike became the best known of them. Takeshi Kitano came at the genre from television: his first film as director was Violent Cop (1989), followed by Boiling Point (1990). The harsh edits, minimal dialogue and sudden violence he settled on there carried through Sonatine (1993) and Hana-bi (1997).

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.

Start here

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

1. Battles Without Honor and Humanity (1973): Fukasaku's handheld epic, the jitsuroku landmark.
2. Street Mobster (1972): Bunta Sugawara, and the true-account style arriving fully formed.
3. Graveyard of Honor (1975): Fukasaku's nastiest.
4. Cops vs. Thugs (1975): the police and the gangs as one organisation.
5. Tokyo Drifter (1966): Seijun Suzuki at Nikkatsu, the pop-art detour.

Toei's other 1970s line, the women's prison and pinky violence pictures: Meiko Kaji and the art of not blinking.