Tatsuo Umemiya

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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.Read More »

Review from Takuma_964 @ Letterboxd wrote:
An absolutely astonishing art house ninkyo yakuza film. Wandering gambler runs into a young swindler woman working with old man. They are both arrested by detective. A year later gambler is staying with gangster boss when he comes across that woman and her partner again. Boss lusts for both her and his own daughter, while the boss’s crazy yakuza brother loves his daughter, who, in turn, watches the player and wants to destroy the people standing in her way. And here lies one of the film’s remarkable departures from the standard ninkyo efforts: it doesn’t have a third party villain, nor a clear distinction between good and evil.Read More »

Review from Takuma_964 @ Letterboxd wrote:
An absolutely astonishing art house ninkyo yakuza film. Wandering gambler runs into a young swindler woman working with old man. They are both arrested by detective. A year later gambler is staying with gangster boss when he comes across that woman and her partner again. Boss lusts for both her and his own daughter, while the boss’s crazy yakuza brother loves his daughter, who, in turn, watches the player and wants to destroy the people standing in her way. And here lies one of the film’s remarkable departures from the standard ninkyo efforts: it doesn’t have a third party villain, nor a clear distinction between good and evil. It’s bursting with romantic emotion and wrenched with gritty realism, shot with striking black and white compositions, and explodes into shocking carnage. It has lengthier, more detailed gambling scenes than any other yakuza film I’ve seen. And it has a heartbreakingly beautiful score. You could call it the Ashes of Time of ninkyo yakuza films. A masterpiece!Read More »

PLOT: A police investigator cracks down on yakuza business, but once he realizes the police are in negotiations with certain factions, he sides with his own syndicate of choice.Read More »

Gang leader Nami (Meiko Kaji) kills a member of a yakuza group and goes away to prison. Upon her release three years later, she’s a shamed woman confined to living in the shadowy world of sex clubs and street gangs. She returns to the city to live with her uncle, a billiard-hall owner, and after befriending pimp and ne’er-do-well Ryuji (Tsunehiko Watase), she gets a job working at a hostess club in the chic Ginza neighborhood, where the expensive shops and neon lights conceal a dark world of crime and sexual slavery. But when a rival gang attempts to muscle in on the club, Nami becomes enmeshed in a violent struggle that forces her to wield a skilled pool cue to defend her uncle’s business, and eventually a short sword to wreak bloody vengeance upon her enemies.Read More »

A disgraced yakuza member, framed for the murder of his boss, emerges from prison eight years later with revenge on his mind.Read More »

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Set during the turbulent post-war years, Fukasaku’s original 1975 film charts the rise and fall of real-life gangster Rikio Ishikawa (Tetsuya Watari, Outlaw Gangster VIP). Shot through with the same stark realism and quasi-documentarian approach as Fukasaku’s earlier Battles Without Honor and Humanity, Fukasaku nonetheless breaks new ground through his portrayal of a gangster utterly without honor or ethics, surviving by any means necessary in a world of brutal criminality.Read More »

With the memory of WW II still fresh in Japan in1960, the atmosphere is unsettled as the specter of renewed world nuclear conflict is once again in the air. When a US military aircraft carrying a nuclear weapon inexplicably explodes over a river crossing the line of demarcation between South and North Korea during South Korean military exercises in the area, tension between Cold War antagonists rise to new heights, involving Japan directly because of the American military bases they host. As accusations of blame are traded back and forth, the movie tracks the increasingly volatile situation through the eyes of a group of Japanese high school students and their families, a newspaper reporter and his idealistic nurse girlfriend, and a Christian troubadour and his invalid wife.Read More »

Synopsis:
As Japan gears up for the 1964 Olympic games, the cops start to crack down under pressure from the public and the press, adding a new dimension in the war for power among the yakuza families of Hiroshima. Takeda (Akira Kobayashi) tries to keep a lid on things, but hotheaded underlings create chaos, with one boss whacked in neutral territory and the craven boss, Uchimoto, informing on an assassination attempt by his own minions. While the police round up hundreds of yakuza foot soldiers, Shozo Hirono (Bunta Sugawara) plots to finally take out longtime nemesis, boss Yamamori.Read More »