Kinji Fukasaku: The Chronicler of Yakuza Chaos

In the summer of 1945 Kinji Fukasaku was fifteen and working in a munitions factory, because that is what fifteen-year-olds did. The factory was bombed. He and the surviving boys spent the following days pulling their classmates out of the wreckage and disposing of the bodies themselves, and he told the story for the rest of his life in almost identical words: they dived under each other for cover when the raids came, and the ones underneath died. Then the war ended and the state that had told them all of this was necessary and honourable simply stopped saying so, and every adult carried on as though nothing had been claimed.

Everything Fukasaku made comes out of that fortnight. Forty years of gangsters shooting each other in stairwells, a science-fiction epic set in Antarctica, a Star Wars knock-off with a space galleon, and finally a film about schoolchildren issued weapons and told to kill one another — all of it is a man returning to the same three facts. The state lies. Loyalty is a mechanism for getting people like you killed. And the people at the top always survive.

Toei, and the apprenticeship in programme pictures

He was born in Mito, Ibaraki, in 1930, and joined Toei in the mid-fifties, moving up to features by 1961 with Sonny Chiba vehicles turned out on the studio’s B-programme. The early sixties work is competent and mostly anonymous — Greed in Broad Daylight (1961) shows the eye arriving — and the interesting outlier is Black Lizard (1968), an adaptation of Edogawa Rampo by way of a Yukio Mishima play, starring the drag performer Akihiro Miwa as a jewel thief who collects preserved human beings, with Mishima himself appearing as one of the exhibits. It is camp, gorgeous and completely unlike the rest of the filmography, and it proves early that Fukasaku’s range was wider than the reputation suggests.

He was also handed, in 1970, the Japanese half of Tora! Tora! Tora! after Akira Kurosawa left the production, and he shot it under the eye of an American studio. He hated the experience and used the money.

The films that matter begin around 1968: Blackmail Is My Life, Sympathy for the Underdog (1971) and above all Street Mobster (1972), in which Bunta Sugawara plays a thug born on the day Japan surrendered — the coincidence is stated in the first minute — who spends the film being crushed between organisations that are better at violence than he is. The Toei yakuza picture up to that point had run on ninkyo eiga, chivalry films about honourable outlaws in kimonos who followed a code. Fukasaku threw the code in the bin.

Battles Without Honour and Humanity

The title says it. Jingi naki tatakai (1973) and the four sequels that followed within eighteen months are the summit of Japanese crime cinema and one of the great achievements in any national genre.

The source is documentary: a series of newspaper articles by Kōichi Iiboshi drawn from the prison memoirs of a real Hiroshima yakuza, Kōzō Minō. Fukasaku took that and built a five-film chronicle of the Hiroshima underworld from the black-market chaos of the immediate postwar years through decades of betrayal, with Bunta Sugawara as the closest thing to a protagonist in a cast of dozens who are killed off so fast the film has to caption them.

That caption is the key device. When a character dies, the frame freezes and white text names him and gives the date, like a war memorial or a police file. It is used dozens of times across the series, and its effect is to strip every death of drama and convert it into administration — a name, a date, and the next man already talking over the corpse.

The camera does the rest. Fukasaku shot handheld, at speed, tilting the frame off true whenever the violence started, whip-panning to find a body after the shot rather than before, letting focus go and stay gone. The compositions are cramped, the lens is often too close, and the effect is of a newsreel cameraman who has run into a street fight and is trying not to be killed while filming it. Set against the elegance of what Toei had been selling, it read in 1973 as an assault. The films were enormous hits.

Why it works

The method has an argument inside it, and the argument is the war.

A stable camera implies an observer with a safe place to stand. Fukasaku denies you one. The shaky-cam of the modern action film hides the fact that nothing coherent was staged underneath it. Fukasaku works the other way round. He blocks everything with great precision and then photographs it badly on purpose, so that you can always follow the geography while feeling that the recording of it is under threat. Watch any Battles shootout twice and you will find that the blocking is immaculate.

The freeze-and-caption does the moral work. The whip-pan does the physical. And the casting does the rest: Sugawara, Chiba, Hiroki Matsukata and a rotating company of Toei faces play men whose loyalty is constantly solicited by older men in better suits who have no intention of honouring it. The bosses in a Fukasaku film are fat, whining, cowardly and thoroughly safe, and the young men die for them anyway. That is the boy from the munitions factory, still furious at seventy.

The genre split that followed him is instructive. Seijun Suzuki took the same Nikkatsu-and-Toei gangster material and dismantled it through abstraction, colour and absurdity — Branded to Kill turns a hitman picture into a design problem. Fukasaku dismantled it through documentary rigour. Both men destroyed the chivalry film; they used opposite tools. And the next generation inherited the wreckage: Takeshi Kitano’s stillness in Sonatine and Boiling Point is a direct reply to Fukasaku’s chaos, and Takashi Miike took the licence to make the yakuza film mean anything he wanted, which is how you get Gozu.

The writers, and the case against

Battles has a second author and his name should be said. Kazuo Kasahara wrote the first four films and did something almost nobody in genre screenwriting attempts: he built a five-part structure with no hero, no arc and no resolution, in which the audience is asked to track thirty men across twenty years by their alliances rather than their personalities. Kōji Takada took over for the fifth. Kasahara’s scripts are the reason the series holds together at all, and the reason it is so hard — he refuses to simplify, and every betrayal in the chronicle is followed through its consequences even when that means abandoning a face you had begun to like. Toshiaki Tsushima’s score, built around a blaring trumpet fanfare that sounds like a military march played by men who despise the army, is the third author.

And here the honest case. The Battles films are extremely difficult on a first pass. The cast is enormous, the names arrive faster than an unfamiliar viewer can hold them, and the deliberate confusion — a formal choice, and a good one — will lose a great many people in reel two. Women in Fukasaku’s yakuza cinema exist almost entirely to be assaulted or bereaved; the films are aware of it and mount no defence, and a modern viewer is entitled to find that they take the rage of young men very seriously and the fate of everyone else not at all. The paycheque work is genuinely poor: Message from Space, Fall Guy, Legend of the Eight Samurai and a good deal of the eighties output are a great director doing what Toei required, with the handheld fury nowhere in sight. Virus is fascinating and does not work. Nobody needs to defend the whole shelf to make the case for the six or seven films that matter.

The other Fukasaku

The seventies and eighties detour is worth knowing because it is where the career gets strange. Graveyard of Honor (1975) is the bleakest thing he made — a real yakuza’s decade-long self-destruction, filmed with something close to disgust. Cops vs. Thugs (1975) is his most cynical, a film in which the police and the gangs are the same institution with different letterhead.

Then Toei sent him to the fantastic. Message from Space (1978) is a Star Wars cash-in with flying sailing ships. Shogun’s Samurai (1978) and Samurai Reincarnation (1981) are chanbara with Sonny Chiba and a great deal of blood. And Virus (1980) — a global-pandemic epic shot partly in Antarctica with Glenn Ford, Robert Vaughn, Olivia Hussey, Chuck Connors and Chiba, and the most expensive Japanese film made to that date — is a huge, sincere, catastrophically unbalanced picture about the end of the human race that lost so much money it damaged the studio.

Battle Royale, and the end

In 2000, at seventy, he made Battle Royale. A class of ninth-graders is taken to an island by the state, fitted with explosive collars, handed weapons and told that one of them will be permitted to leave. It was denounced in the Japanese Diet, given a restrictive rating, and became one of the most influential films of the decade.

He said openly that the fifteen-year-olds on the island were him and his classmates: the same age, the same betrayal by adults, the same discovery that survival meant somebody else underneath. Sixty years of filmmaking arrive at the literal statement of the thing.

He began shooting the sequel and died of prostate cancer on 12 January 2003, a few days into production; his son Kenta, who wrote it, finished the film.

Where to start

Battles Without Honour and Humanity is the destination and it is a lot — five films, dozens of names, a caption every few minutes. Start instead with Street Mobster, ninety-two minutes and completely legible, then go to Battles with the style already in your hand. Graveyard of Honor is the one that hurts. Battle Royale needs no preparation at all and is the best possible argument that a man in his eighth decade had lost nothing. Watch it last, though, once you know what the boy in the factory saw. It changes what the collars are for.