Jun’ya Satô – Jitsuroku: Shisetsu Ginza keisatsu AKA A True Story of the Private Ginza Police (1973)

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Jitsuroku is usually translated as “true story,” which in the yakuza movies of the seventies meant not so much historical accuracy as it did fights and blood of a new kind. The most famous of the jitsuroku yakuza movies are Kinji Fukasaku’s 5-part Battles Without Honor or Humanity, whose title neatly summarizes the change. The sixties yakuza movie had shown plenty of fights and, as effects gradually improved, increasing gore and blood spatters, but the core of the story was almost always a point of honor within the Yakuza Code and a hero with a sense of human feeling and responsibility. In the seventies, The Code disappeared along with the humane hero and we were offered only the battles and the blood.

Jitsuroku: Shisetsu Ginza keisatsu certainly satisfies anyone in search of fights, shootings, and blood, and the one character who tries to develop something like a traditional gang is killed in a breathtakingly surprising manner that undercuts all genre expectations. We begin with a horrifying act of violence. A soldier Watarai returns to Tokyo in 1946, where he observes his wife having sex with a black GI. After the GI leaves, he throws her black baby over the balcony into the flooded street below and beats his wife to death.

Having established the tone of the picture, we then see the titles over photos of bombed and burned Tokyo, charred corpses still lying beside the operating tramcars, and bodies piled in stacks. In a series of brief violent scenes, we meet Iketani, who is beaten for stealing from the open black market (called the American Market though run by a Korean gang); Masaru who, after he is rejected by a prostitute who only wants Americans, tries to rape her, only to be beaten himself by passing GIs; Iwashita, a soldier who has managed to keep a pistol and robs a store to get money for gambling; and Usami, a long-term gambler. Briefly bonding in an attack on the gang that beat up Iketani, they dub themselves the Ginza Police.

The gang quickly falls apart for no particular reason that we see. Iketani sets up his own black market business and soon puts together a fairly traditional yakuza organization built around that, trying to develop a loyal group of company members and even pressuring one of them to marry his pregnant girlfriend. Usami and Masaru go into the protection racket, eventually aiming for big money from a crooked government official. Usami hooks Watarai on dope (we’re not sure what, though probably morphine) and uses his addiction to turn him into his gunman enforcer. Iketani muscles in on Usami’s racket but lets Usami and Masaru go after their beatings, which will be a mistake. Watarai, assumed to be dying from his wounds, is buried alive but in a gruesome scene worthy of the best horror movies, digs himself out of the grave. Masaru returns, eager to make peace and run his pool hall and women and live only for the pleasures of today, but Usami’s grudge brings Watarai in for a bloodbath at the wedding wedding. Within two years, all of the original gang are dead or in prison, our final gruesome image being Watarai bleeding to death while still desperately trying to find a vein he can inject.

All of this is accompanied by a free jazz score credited to Masanobu Higurashi that is often as irritating and disturbing as the scenes it accompanies.

For fans of pure violence, there’s nothing to top it. Though Fukasaku’s Street Mobster must hold the world record for most fist-fights per hour, this movie comes close, with the extra that many of the fights are bloody and, if Watarai is present, involve guns. In addition, we are given plenty of knifings, rape, torture (though of the businessmen, not any women), and even get to watch the pigs eat a dead body. It is a poem of violence, as much or more so than Zero Woman, Fukasaku’s early Battles, or Assault: Jack the Ripper.

However, there is more to the movie than unrelenting violence. The jitsuroku not only claimed to tell the truth about the yakuza, it claimed to tell the truth about the times. In this case, it is the Occupation. Visually, they live in a convincingly accurate bombed-out Tokyo, where street buildings are shacks and rooms are merely the partial remains of otherwise bombed buildings.

Even the home bar/club for the gang can only be reached by a ladder, its name scrawled (in English) with white paint like graffiti. Now able to work without Occupation censorship that hampered the “neo-realist” approach of the forties movies, film-makers could now include Americans on screen, and they are ever-present. They take the women, usually with money, but we see at least one scene of an American’s attempted rape. They control the police. They provide the black market goods. More significant is that it is a world in which only money has any value, with all the old ties of family and clan completely replaced, and even the wedding is now Americanized.

Based originally on memoirs of several yakuza, most notably those of Noboru Ando who became a star and appears here as Iketani, the jitsuroku films were an attempt to remove the glamour from film yakuza, just as the series of great sixties chanbara exposed some uncomfortable truths behind the legendary samurai heroics. But as often happens, this backfired with a significant part of the audience, who couldn’t get enough of the wall-to-wall violence, sex, and blood. Soon it became difficult to tell who was making movies about the “truth” and who was simply making exploitation films. I haven’t seen any sociologist’s writing that tries to explain why the yakuza audience at this particular time turned toward this type of movie, but there is no doubt that it killed off the honorable yakuza story, and in turn, by the end of the decade all but killed off the yakuza film itself. Of course, film violence was the foundation stone of Japanese movie making, from the earliest silents consisting almost solely of swordfight scenes borrowed from Kabuki into the present day films of people like Miike, and the modern manga could not exist without its extreme violence, but both those forms tried to ration the violence, to spread it out across the plot lines, with love stories, political history, character revelation, and even on occasion suspense. By the seventies, the chanbara was dying as a dominant box-office genre, with one of its last gasps being the Lone Wolf and Cub series that adopted the constant battle and gore of the jitsuroku. That left only the yakuza film for audiences craving violence.

Since Ginza Police appeared six months after Fukasaku’s first installment, it is easy to think of it as an imitation, but for several years, this was had been the director Jun’ya Sato’s film style as well. There is no doubt that from the opening through to its grotesque climactic party, the movie looks and feels like a Fukasaku movie, with the same energy, the same freeze-frames, the same intercutting of photos, and regular use of handheld and tilted camera. It is always difficult to prove filmic “firsts,” but the less famous Sato may actually have broken the ground for the seventies yakuza movie with his brutal Private Police in 1969, pairing the two new seventies yakuza stars, Ando and Bunta Sugawara, with an unusual amount of violence. From this distance, Ginza Police is not a movie to be liked or possibly even admired. Nevertheless, as pure movie-making it is one of the high points of the genre, worthy of comparison with Fukasaku’s better-known movies.

A.True.Story.of.the.Private.Ginza.Police.1973.1080p.AMZN.WEB-DL.DDP2.0.x264-EC.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 34 min
Size: 	9.82 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1920x816 
Aspect ratio:  	2.35:1
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	14.7 Mb/s
BPP: 	0.390
Audio
#1:  	Japanese 2.0ch E-AC-3 @ 224 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/4B31AC0B122C232/A.True.Story.of.the.Private.Ginza.Police.1973.1080p.AMZN.WEB-DL.DDP2.0.x264-EC.mkv

Language(s):Japanese
Subtitles:English