A Critical Handbook of Japanese Film Directors. Alexander Jacoby

Kinji

      (July 3, 1930–January 12, 2003)

      深作欣二

      A specialist in action cinema from the early sixties onwards, Fukasaku had acquired an international profile within the industry as early as 1970, having taken charge of the Japanese half of the Pearl Harbor saga Tora! Tora! Tora! (a Toei-20th Century Fox co-production) after Akira Kurosawa was removed from the project. Despite this and two later science fiction co-productions—Message from Space (Uchū kara no messēji, 1978) and Virus (Fukkatsu no hi, 1980) —with international casts, he ironically achieved a reputation among foreign audiences only at the end of his life. A retrospective at Rotterdam in 2000 was followed by the wide distribution of his last completed feature, Battle Royale (Batoru rowaiaru, 2000), which had courted controversy in Japan with its story of a class of teenagers compelled to fight to the death in a radical government measure to deal with youth crime. In fact, this savage satire was atypically elaborate in concept compared to the genre pieces which constituted the bulk of Fukasaku’s work. Based largely at Toei during the sixties and seventies, he worked primarily on yakuza films, distinguished by their postwar settings (in contrast to the Edo- or Meiji-era yakuza films of Toei colleagues such as Tai Katō) and by the stylistic immediacy which would typify Toei’s seventies specialty, the jitsuroku-eiga.

      Fukasaku acknowledged the influence of the French New Wave, an influence most obviously visible in Blackmail Is My Life (Kyōkatsu koso ga waga jinsei, 1968), with its use of jump cuts and switches from black and white to color, and in the bold stylization of The Black Lizard (Kurotokage, 1968) and Black Rose Mansion (Kurobara no yakata, 1969), high camp vehicles for transvestite star Akihiro Miwa. Generally, however, Fukasaku opted for a hyperrealist style, using a handheld camera and the zoom lens to give his work the immediacy of newsreel footage. This style reached its apogee in his most famous gangster film, Battles without Honor and Humanity (Jingi naki tatakai, 1973), the first in a long-running series of which Fukasaku directed all but one installment. Here, a meticulous recreation of Occupation-era Hiro­shima captured the post-apocalypse zeitgeist and showed how crime flourished in the political near-vacuum of immediate postwar Japan.

      The trauma of World War II, generally a backdrop to Fukasaku’s work, was the subject of his best film, Under the Flag of the Rising Sun (Gunki hatameku moto ni, 1972), a Rashomon-like investigation into the circumstances of a military execution, revealed in flashback through the differing accounts of four witnesses. Free from the conventions of genre filmmaking, Fukasaku produced a subversive examination of a taboo subject, and an acknowledgement that the historical record, shaped by partial personal testimony, is inevitably unreliable. Another politically conscious non-genre film was If You Were Young: Rage (Kimi ga wakamono nara, 1970), in which the bleak experiences of five working-class men in Tokyo were used with some intelligence and plausibility as a microcosm of the problems of the Japanese proletariat as a whole.

      Nevertheless, Fukasaku’s champions have tended to place undue emphasis on elements of social criticism in his genre pieces, from the depiction of life in the slums in such early films as Greed in Broad Daylight (Hakuchū no buraikan, 1961) and Wolves, Pigs and Men (Ōkami to buta to ningen, 1964), to the exposure of political corruption in Blackmail Is My Life, to the implied association of the yakuza with the pro-militarist far right in Japan Organized Crime Boss (Nihon bōryokudan: Kumichō, 1969), and the explicit links between the mob and the police in Cops vs. Thugs (Kenkei tai soshiki bōryoku, 1975) and Yakuza Graveyard (Yakuza no hakaba: Kuchinashi no hana, 1976). Jasper Sharp and Tom Mes have praised the way in which Fukasaku’s yakuza films explored the dark underside of Japan’s postwar reconstruction, but the presentation of petty criminals as heroic rebels against the establishment merely suggested a preference for anarchic violence over authoritarian violence. Even in his most interesting films, Fukasaku’s effects were calculated to place sadistic emphasis on the physical details of bloodshed. In Under the Flag of the Rising Sun, monochrome flashbacks dissolve into color to display killings more graphically; freeze frames hold severed limbs in lingering close up in Battles without Honor and Humanity; and onscreen text tallies the death toll in Battle Royale. The limitation of Fuka­saku’s work was not so much that his characters lacked honor and humanity as that the director himself rarely adopted a compensating moral perspective on their brutality.

      Though he continued intermittently to make crime thrillers, such as The Triple Cross (Itsu ka giragira suru hi, 1992), until the end of his career, Fukasaku also made jidai-geki in his later years. Some were purely commercial: Legend of the Eight Samurai (Satomi hakkenden, 1983) consisted almost solely of special effects and action thrills, paying scant regard to narrative plausibility or historical reality. Nevertheless, Fukasaku’s characteristic anti-authoritarianism was visible in such works as Shogun’s Samurai (Yagyū ichizoku no inbō, 1978), which iconoclastically rewrote history by depicting the fictitious murder of Shogun Iemitsu, and Sure Death: Revenge (Hissatsu 4: Urami harashimasu, 1987), which portrayed the ill-treatment of Edo-period slum dwellers by samurai. Though these films were more style than substance, they earned Fukasaku a reputation as a reliable commercial director, which gave him the freedom to mount such offbeat projects as Fall Guy (Kamata kōshinkyoku, 1982), a satire on the film industry depicting the relationship between an arrogant star and his devoted stunt double, and later Battle Royale. He died while directing the sequel to that film; completed by his son Kenta, it was poorly received. After years of neglect, however, Fukasaku’s own reputation is now higher than it deserves to be.

      1961 Fūraibō tantei: Akai tani no sangeki / The Drifting Detective: Tragedy of the Red Valley

      Fūraibō tantei: Misaki o wataru kuroi kaze / The Drifting Detec­tive: Black Wind across the Cape

      Fankī hatto no kaidanji / Vigilante in the Funky Hat

      Fankī hatto no kaidanji: Nisen­man-en no ude / Vigilante in the Funky Hat: The 20 Million Yen Arm

      Hakuchū no buraikan / Greed in Broad Daylight / High Noon for Gangsters

      1962 Hokori takaki chōsen / The Proud Challenge

      Gyangu tai G-men / Gang vs. G-Men

      1963 Gyangu dōmei / Gang Alliance

      1964 Jakoman to Tetsu / Jakoman and Tetsu

      Ōkami to buta to ningen / Wolves, Pigs and Men

      1966 Odoshi / Threat

      Kamikaze yarō: Mahiru no kettō / The Kamikaze Guy: Duel at High Noon

      Hokkai no abareryū / Exploding Dragon of the North Sea

      1967 Kaisanshiki / Dissolution Ceremony / The Breakup

      1968 Bakuto kaisanshiki / Gamblers’ Dissolution Ceremony

      Kurotokage / The Black Lizard

      Kyōkatsu koso ga waga jinsei / Blackmail is My Life / Call Me Blackmail

      Ganma 3-gō: Uchū daisakusen / The Green Slime / Battle Beyond the Stars (lit. Gamma 3: Big Operation in Space)

      1969 Kurobara no yakata / Black Rose Mansion

      Nihon bōryokudan: Kumichō / Japan Organized Crime Boss

      1970 Chizome no daimon / Bloody Coat of Arms

      Kimi ga wakamono nara / If You Were Young: Rage / Our Dear Buddies

      Tora! Tora! Tora! (co-director)

      1971 Bakuto gaijin butai / Gambler: Foreign Opposition / Gamblers in Okinawa / Sympathy for the Underdog

      1972 Gunki hatameku moto ni / Under the Flag of the Rising Sun

      Gendai yakuza: Hitokiri yota / Street Mobster / The Code of the Killer / Modern Yakuza: Outlaw Killer (lit.)

      Hitokiri yota: Kyōken sankyōdai / The Code of the Killer: Three Mad Dog Brothers

      1973 Jingi naki tatakai / Battles without Honor and Humanity / The Yakuza Papers

      Jingi naki tatakai: Hiroshima shitō hen / Battles without Honor and Humanity: Fight to the Death in Hiroshima

      Jingi naki tatakai: Dairi sensō / Battles