The nature of violence in Fukasaku

Kinjis Jingi naki tatakai

(War without a code of honor)
RICHARD TORRANCE

Abstract: This article focuses on the role of violence in Fukasaku Jinjis Jingi
naki tatakai (War without a code of honor) series (19734). It reviews the formalistic way in which violence was presented in pre-1973 yakuza films and contrasts this with Fukasakus cinematic style, which broke all the rules of the genre.
Fukasaku opted for a highly realistic, documentary approach. This documentary
style is examined by considering the prison memoirs of a yakuza gang member
and other sources upon which the films were based and then by providing examples of the manner in which Fukasaku translated these written materials into
cinematic images. It is argued that, for Fukasaku, the world of the yakuza is only
a microcosm of the broader society and international order of the post-war period, in which violence lacks moral significance and exists without heroes. The
continued relevance of these films in the light of current events is noted.
Keywords: Fukasaku Kinji, yakuza, Japanese film, post-war Japanese society,
violence in film

From 1973 to 1974, Fukasaku Kinji (19302003) exploded and transformed

the genre of the Japanese yakuza, or gangster, film in his Jingi naki tatakai (War
without a code of honor) series. In doing so, he established himself as one of
Japans most important directors. This was because more than any other director
Fukasaku unflinchingly portrayed the political rather than moral significance of
violence in contemporary society. In other words, while his predecessors in the
yakuza genre used violence to reinforce the lofty moral themes of loyalty and
honor, Fukasakas yakuza films are solely about violence, how it does not go
away, how it is institutionalized from the top of the international order to the
local neighborhood, and how it is the product of exploitation, fear and greed.
There is no honor in violence in Fukasakus films, but there is the voyeuristic and
intellectual satisfaction that we are watching something real and serious.
Japan Forum 17(3) 2005: 389406
C 2005 BAJS
Copyright

ISSN: 09555803 print/1469932X online

DOI: 10.1080/09555800500283950

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From 1973 to 1976, Fukasaku made nine yakuza films, about one every six
months, with the word jingi (a term used to describe the traditional yakuza code
of morality, honor, deference and proper conduct) in their titles. The first five, the
Jingi naki tatakai series, made from 1973 to 1974, are the most energetic and will
be discussed here. Jingi naki tatakai (War without a code of honor, 1973), Jingi
naki tatakai: Hiroshima shito hen (War without a code of honor: the battle over
Hiroshima, 1973), Jingi naki tatakai: dairi senso (War without a code of honor:
surrogate wars, 1973), Jingi naki tatakai: chojo sakusen (War without a code of
honor: strategy at the summit, 1974) and Jingi naki tatakai: kanketsu hen (War
without a code of honor: the concluding chapter, 1974) will be explored below in
terms of the studio system in Japan, the adoption of a new documentary approach
to making yakuza films and the historical setting of the series. It will be argued
that Fukasaku approached his material from the perspective that violence in the
post-war era lacked any moral foundation and instead functioned first as a tool
used by those in power merely for their own advantage and second as a kind of
mass hysteria that gets away from those attempting to manipulate it. The world
of the yakuza is only a microcosm of a broader society and international order
in which violence exists for its own sake without a code of honor, without moral
significance and the past master of the practice and manipulation of violence is
the United States.
The traditional yakuza movie had been a stable source of profit for Japans film
industry, especially for the company Toei,

since the 1930s. However, as Keiko

McDonald notes in her excellent article on the history of the yakuza film genre:
By the early 1970s the yakuza film genre had passed its prime and begun to
share in the general decline of the Japanese film industry. The public had tired
of its theme and variations of virtue rewarded. . . .Unwilling to let go of such a
profitable commodity, the Toei
Company took radical steps, putting Fukasaku
Kinji in charge of sweeping changes in method, formula, and subject matter.
(McDonald 1992:184)
Fukasaku Kinji was chosen to direct Jingi naki tatakai on the basis of his previous work, including Hokori takaki chosen (The proud challenge, 1962), an international suspense thriller which exposed the conspiracy between Japans business
and political elite and the CIA to sell weapons in Southeast Asia, Hitokiri Yota:
kyoken san kyodai (Yota the killer: three wild dog killers, 1972) and Gendai yakuza:
hitokiri Yota (Modern yakuza: the killer Yota, 1972), two yakuza movies starring
Sugawara Bunta, and Gunki hatameku moto ni (Under the flag of the rising sun,
1972), a prize-winning film which chronicles how the devastating effects of the
Second World War were borne by ordinary people while those responsible for the
war suffered little. These groundbreaking films established Fukasaku as a director
who was experimenting within established genres to take Japanese film in a more
realistic direction but who was also clearly aware that the final product had to be
commercially viable. Politically, he was an oppositional figure, and in the context

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of yakuza films, he pioneered a documentary-like (jitsuroku) approach to the genre

that broke with a pattern of exploiting violence to present a gratifying conclusion
in support of conventional morality (Schilling 2003: 445, 55).1
The 1967 movie Kyokotsu ichidai (The chivalrous life, Toei),

starring Takakura
Ken and directed by the famous yakuza film director Makino Masahiro, provides a
typical portrayal of morally inspired violence in the pre-Jingi naki tatakai (pre-War
without a code of honor) genre of yakuza film and illustrates what Fukasaku was
rebelling against. The hero, Ryuma,

played by Takakura Ken, the most popular

actor of the day, is from a family so poor that as a boy he eats white rice only once,
when he is sent off to a Buddhist temple as an indentured servant. He is drafted
during the Second World War and returns to a devastated Japan, where he finds
construction work among gangs of day laborers. As is true of numerous films of
the genre, the toughest men in construction crews also function as gang members
to protect the interests of the construction companys boss, the oyabun. Ryuma

is
taken in by a kindly oyabun whose overriding ambition is to build a sewage system
for the common people of Tokyo. However, this good boss is killed by yakuza sent
by an unscrupulous contractor who lost out in the bidding. Takakura Ken/Ryuma

goes to revenge his boss and defend his crew. In short, the film is drenched in
moral clarity. The yakuza as represented by Takakura Ken becomes an outlaw
because of abstract social circumstances, not a defect in character or, worse, lust
for profit, and he operates according to a moral code of loyalty and compassion.
Violence reflects the heros defense of moral order. The climactic scene is staged
according to the classic, formalized pattern of violence that was commonplace in
most yakuza movies before Jingi naki tatakai. Ryuma

meets his old army comrade,

who is employed by the rival gang, and this friend feels compelled to fight Ryuma

out of a sense of jingi (loyalty and honor). So fair-minded is Ryumas

former
comrade that he brings two swords, one for Ryuma.

Ryuma

comments, You
arent fighting me out of some silly, old-fashioned code of jingi, are you? Yes I
am, his former comrade indicates by nodding his head. Jingi is exactly the reason
he is fighting. He realizes that his boss, his oyabun, is evil, but his sense of loyalty
compels him to risk his life. Of course, Takakura Ken never loses and after the
sword fight between the two good yakuza, he proceeds to the climatic scene that is
copied almost verbatim from samurai movies: the lone swordsman cutting down
dozens of his surrounding opponents until he gets to his real enemy, the villain,
in this case the evil contractor, whom he kills with his sword. Violence then is so
predictably formalized along the lines of good and evil that it almost ceases to be
violence and becomes instead justified retribution. The yakuza, Ryuma,

is entirely
worthy, a defender of the poor and the traditional values of jingi.
Fukasaku knew well the rules of the genre he was about to demolish. Before
Jingi naki tatakai, in addition to the films noted above, he had directed dozens of
action pictures yakuza films, war films, detective films distinguished mostly by
exploitative sex and violence. Judging from the plot, it is clear that he intended
at least the first movie in the Jingi naki tatakai series to be interpreted within the

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The nature of violence in Fukasaku Kinjis Jingi naki tatakai

context of the genre of the yakuza film. The plot of the first film is quite similar
to Kyokotsu ichidai. The central character, Hirono Shoz
o,
played by Sugawara
Bunta, was born and raised poor and has recently returned from the front after
Japans defeat. Hirono falls in with gangsters. Like so many characters in yakuza
movies, joining a gang is the only way for an ex-Imperial soldier to survive in
the immediate post-war period. In Kure, a small city about ten miles south of
Hiroshima, Hirono becomes involved in defending black market innocents from
the cruel violence of American soldiers and the local Uchimoto gang. He finally
kills a particularly odious bully and, on release from prison, is taken into the newly
forming Yamamori gang.
However, the images that appear on the screen are radically different from anything that had appeared before in yakuza films. Fukasaku adopted a visual style
that was highly original and freed the yakuza film from the fixed perspective that
creates heroes. In taking the yakuza film in a new direction, he was clearly influenced by cinema verite. In a scene in which Hirono, at the behest of Yamamori,
is going to assassinate a rival boss, Doi, the handheld camera follows Hirono as
if being carried by a reporter, then circles around to record the brutal, bloody
slaughter of Doi on a public street. Nothing is formalized to make the central
character, Hirono, heroic, or the victim writhing in pain in a pool of his own
blood, villainous (Plate 1). It is this almost journalistic realism that extends to

Plate 1 Hirono shoots rival boss Doi in the street.

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393

every aspect of the series production, from the jerky, street-level camera work to
the journalistic montage of newspaper headlines and newsreel images.
Fukasaku believed that the function of a filmmaker was to record the reality
around us (Schilling 2003: 54). The screenplays for the series were based on
true events that occurred in Kure and Hiroshima from 1945 to 1970 and provided Fukasaku with the framework within which to explore the savage realities
of urban life, among which he had been raised: My Yakuza movies come from
my experiences when I was fifteen, in the burnt-out ruins and the black market
(Schilling 2003: 53). Since the major events of the series correspond closely to the
facts of the yakuza wars in Hiroshima and Kure, these will be reviewed to provide
a general outline of the plot of the series and to demonstrate that Fukasaku found
that closely following reality was conducive to the creation of what became an
epic of underclass life in the post-war period.
The facts are these. In the post-war period, the dominant criminal gang in Kure
and vicinity was the Tsuchioka gang headed by Tsuchioka Hiroshi. Threatened by
the growing power of Tsuchioka, Yamamura Tatsuo, the head of a much smaller
gang in Kure, ordered his underling, Mino Koz
o,
to kill Tsuchioka. Mino failed
and was arrested and imprisoned. On his release from prison, Mino found that his
oyabun, Yamamura, had succeeded in having his rival murdered, and, having made
huge profits from transporting explosives for the United States during the Korean
War, was challenging older, established gangs for dominance in Hiroshima. Further, the growth of the Yamamura gang led to internal dissension over which
sub-groups in the organization would control which legal and illegal enterprises:
for example, the sale of amphetamines. Adding to the tension in Hiroshima was the
incursion of nationwide criminal groups, notably the Honda and the Yamaguchi
gangs, which were intent on exploiting dissension for their own profit. Constantly
shifting alliances and betrayals, alignments with conservative politicians who traditionally used yakuza gangs for their own ends and long-standing enmities finally
erupted in the Hiroshima wars of 1963 and 1964. Over a span of ten months, nine
gang members were killed, thirteen injured, 168 gang members arrested, and the
citizenry of Hiroshima and Kure constantly frightened at the prospect of being
caught in the crossfire.
Yamamura had expelled Mino from his gang because of Minos growing independence, and Mino had created his own gang based in Kure. With the murder
of one of his friends by Yamamura men, Mino allied himself with the Yamaguchi
group and prepared for war with Yamamura. Yamaguchi sent in hundreds of troops
to back up Mino, while the Honda group supported Yamamura with hundreds
of men. Hiroshima police, some in the pay of Yamamura, arrested Mino on the
charge of complicity in an assault, in order to defuse the situation. Minos detention did not stop the violence, but he was found guilty, his parole revoked, and he
was imprisoned, mostly at the infamous Abashiri penitentiary in Hokkaido, from
1963 to 1970. During his time in jail, Mino recorded the history of the violence
he had witnessed and taken part in Kure and Hiroshima.

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The nature of violence in Fukasaku Kinjis Jingi naki tatakai

This chronicle came into the possession of Iiboshi Koichi

(192796), a reporter working for the Yomiuri Shinbun, who turned it into a multi-volume documentary novel, and this novel, Jingi naki tatakai (1970), and supplementary
interviews and other sources, served as the basis for the screenplays for the series by Kasahara Kazuo (19272002). The Jingi naki tatakai series, then, is the
most factually accurate and realistic series of yakuza movies that had ever been
made up until that time and probably since. The incidents, dates, main characters, settings and judgements of motivations and alliances are all taken over
from Minos account as assessed, fictionalized and supplemented by the journalist Iiboshi. Even the names of characters in the films are similar to their real life
counterparts. For example, Yamamura Tatsuo becomes Yamamori Yoshio in the
movie, Mino Koz
o becomes Hirono Shoz
o and so on. Kasahara changed certain details. In Minos account, he fails to kill the rival boss, but in the movie
Hirono succeeds, making Yamamoris betrayal of him seem all the more treacherous. However, by and large, Kasahara does a masterful job of incorporating
Minos Hiroshima dialect and the brutality of Minos world into his screenplays
(Iiboshi 1970).2
However, from the first, there was considerable tension between Kasahara and
Fukasaku over the direction the films would take. Kasahara wanted to create a
more generic yakuza film, similar in style to Kyokotsu ichidai: violence with a moral
message. Fukasaku wished to use the genre to portray contemporary realities. In
his memoir of his time working on the series, Kasahara frequently complains of
the inchoate nature of the material he was supposed to give shape to. He recalls
how he struggled to write the first screenplay in the series:
I attempted to lay down a paper-thin foundation of emotional drama concerning duty versus human feeling (giri ninjo) and then using this, approach a documentary style by bringing out the meaner aspects of the human condition. I
envisioned a half-step forward. I faced a great deal of severe criticism. The
main characters look too good. Thats not the way real yakuza life is. There
is nothing new about this. So I gave up and went the whole way.
(Kasahara 1998: 341)
Despite his reservations, with the success of the first film, Kasahara was commissioned to do more scripts concerning the yakuza wars in Hiroshima. He was
at a loss as to how to proceed. The consummate professional, he traveled around
the country interviewing Mino, his friends and other direct and indirect participants in the Hiroshima wars. Kasahara kept trying to form these sources into
something dramatic, but was unable to do so. The more people he talked to, the
more contradictory the testimony became:
All of these guys with smiles on their faces. How was I to show on the screen
the underlying suspicion, jealousy, fear, and confusion? Even if I could do
so, there was no focus for the action. To put it bluntly, these guys were

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395

losers and misfits and their stories were those of losers and misfits. There
was no source for catharsis to please the audience that expected the thrill of
action....
However, the scenario for the third picture in the series, Dairi senso (Surrogate
war), the one I had labored on in despair, sighing with every line, proved, beyond
all my expectations, to be the most popular film in the series. I couldnt believe
it. Why did so many people want to see a movie based on a screenplay not even
the screenwriter understood? In the end, they were intoxicated by Fukasaku
Kinjis magnificent direction. I lost all confidence in myself. The screenplay
didnt matter.
(Kasahara 1998: 34750)
The screenplays did matter. So effective were Kasaharas screenplays that they
have developed a cult following with Internet sites featuring such memorable
lines as, That punk is like lit dynamite. If we dont kill him, no telling what
hell do (Ano gedo wa, hi no tsuita bakudan jaken. Ikashitottara, nani shiyagaru
ka wakarando). Or Killing for me is like pulling a tooth (Washa, inochi o toru
mo, mushiba nuku mo onaji koto de).3 Still, Kasahara was unabashedly opposed
to the type of movie he had helped create, a style of film which was described
as both the documentary route (jitsuroku rosen) (Kasahara 1998: 354) and
group drama (gunzo geki) (Kasahara 1998: 339), which meant the action focused on the group, in this case the gang, rather than on individual heroes or
villains.
In terms of the screenplays, the series represents an extraordinary confluence
of voices: Mino Koz
os
chronicle, Iiboshi Koichis

documentary novel, the testimonies collected by Kasahara and Kasaharas tendency to dramatize this material
in terms of creating a hero, a tendency opposed by Fukasaku Kinji, who stated in
an interview with Keiko McDonald:
My contribution to the development of Japanese cinema was to abolish the star
system. . . .Audiences could tell by the star whether the character portrayed was
a good guy or a bad guy. . .I bucked this convention by playing up the negative
aspects of Yakuza life. . . .Then too, I became interested in violence itself, its
contagious, chaotic, purposeless character.
(McDonald 1983: 24)
The person who integrated the many voices in the film according to a documentary style, as Kasahara readily admitted, was Fukasaku:
Of course, the success of the movies was entirely due to Fukasakus mastery.
It was entirely coincidence, like a blind turtle happening upon a floating log in
the sea, that I was able to work with such a master as Fukasaku at the height
of his art. I believe the series was a miracle born of coincidence and chance
encounters.
(Kasahara 1998: 358)

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The nature of violence in Fukasaku Kinjis Jingi naki tatakai

It is clear, then, that Fukasaku was the controlling force shaping the series to
express his perspective on post-war Japanese society. From these competing and
disparate voices, he created narrative voice, defined by Richard Neupert as the
constructed set of narrative cues designating the active telling of the story. . . . To
speak of narrative voice allows us to differentiate textual narrative (intertitles,
overt or self-conscious camera movement and editing) from internal character
narrators (Neupert 1995: 234). Fukasakus overriding concern was realism, and
this required undercutting the romantic, giri ninjo aspects of Kasaharas original
script.
In his early films, Fukasaku was intent on portraying the sociological conditions
of contemporary society. As the critic Yamane Sadao wrote:
No other director has been as obsessed as Fukasaku with portraying the transformation of cityscapes in post-war Japan. He has returned again and again
to scenes of slums constructed on landfills and the towering buildings and oil
refineries of Japans industrial and commercial elite. Or rather, he is obsessed
with the time that hangs between these urban landscapes.
(Yamane 1971: 56)
This obsession with the time that lies between the breeding ground for young
recruits of yakuza gangs and the symbols of contemporary prosperity the Tokyo
Olympics, for example is a central feature of the Jingi naki tatakai series. The
opening scene of the first movie in the series is set in Kures 1945 black market, the
birthplace of Kures post-war yakuza. Everyone in this environment is operating at
a shocking level of senseless violence. In rapid succession, Hirono fights American
soldiers who are attempting to rape a young Japanese woman in full view of crowds
of spectators and is then shot at by an American military policeman (Plate 2);
Wakasugi, later a loyal friend of Hirono, punishes two gang members for stealing
some gasoline by cutting off their arms; other future gang members who are
cooking pigs heads are raided by American military policemen and flee clutching
their stolen merchandise. Throughout the series, Fukasaku demonstrates that
this violent, impoverished post-war milieu does not cease to exist over the twentyfive years the series covers but rather retreats from public view to the slums and
working-class neighborhoods of Kure and Hiroshima.
Thus, he incorporates the frequent fights that break out in dark gambling dens
or the cheap bars where prostitutes and gang women inspire violence. Years after
the black market has disappeared from the main streets of Kure and Hiroshima,
the immediate post-war continues to exist in the scrap-metal business operated
by Hirono. In the second film in the series, Hirono and the younger members of
his gang are reduced to eating stray dogs they kill in the street. In an episode from
Chojo sakusen (Strategy at the summit), a young gang member, Nozaki Hiroshi, is
offered a sum of money if he kills a rival, Fujita, who also happens to be Nozakis
benefactor. Faced with a moral dilemma, Nozaki retreats to his mothers home, a
room about the size of a closet, in Hiroshimas Genbaku Suramu (Atomic Bomb

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397

Plate 2 American MP fires at Hirono after he saves a girl from rape.

Slum). Nozakis mother is terribly disfigured with keloid as a result of the atomic
bombing, and his brother and sisters are noisily arguing around a television that
fills the cramped, humid air with static (Plate 3). Nozaki decides and leaves,
promising to buy his siblings a new television. Of course, money wins out over
loyalty. He assassinates his benefactor and is subsequently arrested.
This kind of sociological imagination that shows so clearly where the yakuza
come from, the immediate post-war period as it continues to exist in Japan in
the 1960s, emerges again and again in the series. Fukasakus yakuza are essentially outcasts and sociopaths, products of the immediate post-war period. Their
violence is without honor, and, at times, lacking rational purpose, becomes violence for the sake of violence. If the violence of an action film has no moral
significance, there is little room for the unifying perspective of the hero. In the
Jingi naki tatakai films, groups become the central focus of the action. Here we
see the creative tension between the sources of the screenplays Mino, Iiboshi,
and Kasahara who tend to romanticize Hirono/Mino, and the direction, which
shows Hirono becoming more and more cynical and amoral over time. He cannot
be the central perspective of the films because of the facts on which the series

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The nature of violence in Fukasaku Kinjis Jingi naki tatakai

Plate 3 At home in the Atomic Bomb Slum, Nozaki decides to commit murder.

is based: Hirono/Mino is in prison for at least one half of the action of the five
films.
So thoroughly does the series focus on individuals in groups rather than a solitary hero that Fukasaku ran out of actors and had to recycle the actors he had
eliminated from the action in previous pictures. For example, Watase Tsunehiko,
the actor who played Arita in the second film he shoots a policeman and is arrested reappears in the third film as the young acolyte gang member, Kuramoto
Takeshi. Umemiya Tatsuo, who plays Wakasugi, killed in the first film, reappears
as Iwai Nobuichi, a gang leader, in the third film.
Fukasakus choice and direction of actors also subverted the romanticizing of
violence. Rather than a heroic figure for the lead, Fukasaku chose Sugawara Bunta,
for the following reason: I thought he might be the right one he was slim and
had those glittering eyes. He looked as though he could rape a woman. Koji
Tsuruta and Ken Takakura wouldnt do that sort of thing but Bunta didnt mind
(Schilling 2003: 50). In addition, Fukasaku and his team put together an ensemble
of extraordinarily disreputable-looking actors, all of whom play men or women
who are essentially sinister. They dress in gaudy or shabby mixtures of Western

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399

and Japanese-style clothing. The oyabun wallow in self-pity and weep to get their
way. Sugawara Buntas eyes gleam in wonder and delight when he finds his men
creating particularly deadly weapons. Young assassins wet themselves in fear before
attacking their victims. Greed, suspicion and fear are palpable in the expressions
of all of the characters. Braggadocio and bombast are always more prevalent than
bravery. Scores of fine performances portraying the group psychology of these
very different misfits enabled Fukasaku to represent the complexity of shifting
alliances and the vicious competitiveness of the yakuza world with a realism that
reflected the sources of the screenplays and in a manner that worked against the
creation of a hero or the kind of traditional group solidarity typical of previous
yakuza films.
There are seven or eight major groups that figure in the Hiroshima wars, again
reflecting the primary sources on which the film series was based. The most rational, successful and old-fashioned is the Muraoka gang, based in Hiroshima.

The Otomo
gang, led by a sociopath, is grabbing as much territory as possible
through sheer brutality. Hironos gang is still running a scrap-metal operation in
Kure. Yamamori continues attempting to extend his influence into Hiroshima,
and meets with great success. His motto, Whoever has the most money, wins,
is portrayed as the model for success in the future for yakuza gangs, rather than
the traditional jingi model. The Uchimoto gang is at first a sub-group of the
Muraoka, but, after Muraoka merges with Yamamori under Yamamoris leadership, Uchimoto breaks off to form his own gang in opposition. The Akashi and
Shinwakai groups are battling for national dominance, and Hiroshima is strategic in their war. Hirono first allies his group with Uchimoto, then switches to
Yamamori, then back again to Uchimoto. The Akashi group and Shinwakai support the Uchimoto and Yamamori respectively.
Fukasaku was highly inventive in communicating the constantly shifting statuses, alliances and betrayals of these groups. The first film in the series portrays,
in about 45 seconds, how Yamamoris gang gains power after 1950. We see the
technique of documentary montage that Fukasaku utilizes to objectify and demoralize his material. First, the death of Wakasugi at the hands of the police is
underlined by a seemingly objective, journalistic notation of his name and age
at death written at the bottom of the frame. Then American troops and armaments ships en route to the Korean War are referenced by newspaper photos and
newsreels. The voice-over narration tells us that the Yamamori gang has made
immense profits by transporting explosives for the Americans. Finally headlines
from the newspaper tell us that Yamamori is under investigation for dealing in
amphetamines (hiropon). The rapidity and density of exposition and narrative images and the complexity of the human relationships portrayed makes translation
through dubbing or subtitles for an English-speaking audience difficult, which
may explain why the series had not found a wide American audience before its
recent release with subtitles on DVD, despite the popularity of Fukasakus Battle
Royale (2000) in the United States.4

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The nature of violence in Fukasaku Kinjis Jingi naki tatakai

The Yamamori gang has become an umbrella organization for sub-gangs, each
headed by a lieutenant. Yamamori is taking 70 per cent of the profits of his lieutenants. A consistent theme of Minos account, Iiboshis documentary novel and
of the movie series is that the major cause of conflict lies in greedy old men who
live in comfort and manipulate the passions of the young, sometimes through
moral principles such as jingi, but more often by exaggerated promises of reward
that are never granted. In a corrupt world where jingi is merely hypocrisy, these
old men are the most venal and corrupt.
The secret to Yamamoris success (by the end of the series, the gang he
founded is the most powerful criminal organization in Hiroshima) is his ability
to sow discord among his lieutenants and eliminate potential rivals. Sakai enforces Yamamoris order to stop dealing amphetamines, but this buys the enmity
of Shinkai and his lieutenant Arita. Sakai proposes that the sub-gangs become
semi-independent, so that Yamamori will not be held responsible for their criminal actions, such as dealing amphetamines. But this proposal threatens Yamamori
who induces a city council member, Kanamaru, to incite Shinkai and Arita to
wipe out Sakai and those loyal to him. An enraged Sakai, who has learned of the
plot, confronts his boss, Yamamori. He tells Yamamori to expel Shinkai and Arita
from the gang, and when Yamamori objects, he states that a real fight cant be
won with money and that Yamamori is little more than a figurehead. After Sakai
storms out of the room, Yamamoris wife berates Yamamori for his cowardice.
Yamamori replies, These youngsters have no brains. Theyll fight each other and
wear themselves out. Then well see who is a figurehead. Yamamori then betrays
Sakais friend Ueda, another member of Yamamoris own gang, by informing Arita
where Ueda is to be found at a certain time. This vicious act brings about a series
of killings filmed in an objective, documentary manner as we see Arita kill Ueda
and then Sakai take revenge by slaughtering his opposition, driving Arita out of
town, and finally having Shinkai killed as he waits for a train. Sakai ends up in
control of the underworld in Kure.
Yamamori is venality itself and only the most gullible feel any loyalty to him,
but Sakai hesitates to eliminate him because the yakuza ethic forbids killing ones
parent, oyabun. Yamamori has no such scruples, and when Hirono is released from
prison, the frightened Yamamori begs him to risk a third murder conviction and kill
Sakai. Hirono has learned from experience and tells Sakai of Yamamoris plot, but
to no avail, for Yamamori has Sakai murdered by others. In the end, the violence
has meant nothing. It results in the victory of the most cynical and unscrupulous,
Yamamori. Of the members of the gang active in the black market at the start
of the first movie in the series, Ueda, Sakai, Wakasugi, Kanbashi, Shinkai, Yano,
Yamagata and Makihara have all been killed in the yakuza wars. By the end of
the series, only Hirono and Yamamori remain. None of the men who were killed
died for a morally significant reason, and the two survivors live on owing to low
cunning or dumb luck: Yamamori, the coward, retreats to a hospital bed at the
first sign of danger and Hirono is in prison during much of the fighting.

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The final film in the series exposes the utter vacuity of concepts such as loyalty,
honor and righteousness in the yakuza world. The opening voice-over narration
informs us that the Hiroshima wars have reached their greatest intensity in 1963,
with seventeen people dead, twenty-six severely injured and 1,604 arrested. In
response to public outrage at the continued violence in the streets of Hiroshima
and the deaths of innocent citizens, the police begin a crackdown on all the gangs.
In 1964, Takeda Akira, head of the Yamamori gang after Yamamoris retirement,
reorganizes the yakuza groups in Hiroshima by having them nominally dissolve
and join together in a political organization, the Tenseikai. On 6 August 1965,
the twentieth anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, the
Tenseikai participates in force in the annual peace demonstration. The picturing

of such violent psychopaths as Otomo

Katsutoshi marching under banners proclaiming support for Peace and Democracy is so ludicrous that it undercuts the
claims made in the name of the yakuza ethic to be preserving Japans traditional
code of honor (Plate 4).
Isolde Standish is one critic who maintains, contrary to what has been argued
here, that the Jingi naki tatakai series reinforces Japanese tradition and is yet

Plate 4 Yakuza march in Hiroshima peace demonstration.

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The nature of violence in Fukasaku Kinjis Jingi naki tatakai

another expression of Japanese homogeneity established through a sense of shared

victimization. Standish writes:
The principal narrative structure of the tragic hero, implicit in Chushingura,
is in fact the principal narrative structure through which aspects of modern
Japanese history have been codified and interpreted in popular film [and this]
tragic figure [is a] figurative structure through which the Japanese people could
interpret the events of the Second World War and defeat.
(Standish 2000: 193)
This analysis seems to be derived from the previous work of Ruth Benedict in
that it uses a theatrical motif similar to giri ninjo as the point of departure for
vast generalizations about complex Japanese social phenomena. But the totalizing
effect of Standishs method leaves no room for self-reflexivity in Fukasakus critique of his own society, for he too, as a Japanese, must be implicated in the same
totality. Instead, legitimate criticism of Japanese society can only take place from
the perspective of the morally superior outsider. Thus, according to Standish,
the appeal of the Jingi naki tatakai series is not based on its realistic portrayal of
violence among criminal gangs in Japanese society, or the class divisions and desperate poverty that create such gangs, or on jingi as the ethical code of sociopaths;
rather, the appeal of the series lies in nostalgia:
Through appeals to nostalgia, these films contribute to nihonjinron discourses
of the group nature of Japanese society. Through nostalgia, the work-group
ethos of the post-war economic recovery period is endowed with a reconstructed
positive image of traditional Japanese values based on a libidinal investment
of the sensuality of the image.
(Standish 2000: 199)
As evidence for this reading of the series, Standish cites the representations of
American violence, which she interprets as manifestations of a critique of western
style individualism and the materialism of modern society and as anti-American
sentiments (Standish 2000: 199).
But how could any filmmaker concerned with exploring the inchoate and random nature of violence in the post-war world not take into account the incessant
threat of or actual unleashing of American violence on a massive scale? American
violence was the defining political issue for Fukasaku and his generation. Fukasaku
was drafted to work in a factory in his third year of middle school, and the smell
of the rotting corpses of fellow workers after his factory was bombed made an indelible impression on him (Tayama 1991: 99). The American suppression of the
left, with the collusion of Japanese conservatives, during the Occupation and the
American intervention in Southeast Asia, again with Japanese conservative collusion, were, as noted above, the subjects of Fukasakus film, Hokori takaki chosen.
Fukasaku recounts that the widespread demonstrations against the renewal of the
US-Japan Security Treaty and the war in Vietnam, their suppression by the state

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403

and the subsequent disintegration of the student left into factional violence in the
early 1970s were a source of inspiration for the Jingi naki tatakai series (Schilling
2003: 51). To equate Fukasakus incorporation of personal and political experience into his films with the projection of traditional values or of the tragic hero or
of a critique of western style individualism and the materialism of modern society
is to deny the series its universal and contemporary significance, and reinforces a
tendency among some Western critics to use critical theory to re-establish older,
essentializing notions about Japanese society.
The Jingi naki tatakai series is extremely violent, and Fukasaku Kinji was obviously exploiting violence for cinematic effect, but his particular talent lay in
exposing the superficiality of the moral justifications for violence on the part of
those who claimed legitimacy for using it, specifically, the American military,
the Japanese police and the yakuza. In this regard, the series is also a meditation on the enduring nature of violence in the post-war period, a meditation
on its contagious, chaotic, purposeless character. The world of the yakuza is
only a microcosm of a broader society and international order in which violence exists without a code of honor, without moral significance. The master
of the practice and manipulation of violence is the United States. Yakuza violence pales beside the mass destruction inflicted on civilian populations by the
United States. This point is made again and again throughout the series, with
each film in the series framed and internally substantiated with images of American
violence.
In the opening sequence of the first film, we see the explosion of the atomic
bomb in Hiroshima, the Hiroshima Dome, naked people in the bombed-out shells
of their houses, urban scenes of the destruction and desolation of war, an American
Occupation soldier directing traffic and the black market. Later in the movie, as
noted above, there are American soldiers raping a Japanese woman and the Korean
War enabling the Yamamori gang to prosper. In the second film, we start off again
with the image of the Hiroshima Dome, then cut to a jet fighter taking off from a
Japanese base for Korea, the explosion of bombs over Korea, cities in flames, tanks
and weaponry waiting to be loaded onto American naval ships and an American
military pistol used to commit crimes by yakuza in Japan. Dairi senso (Surrogate
wars), the third film, opens with protests against the US-Japan Security Treaty,
the stabbing to death of the anti-treaty socialist Asanuma Inejiro,
and proceeds
to American jets bombing Vietnam and horrific scenes from the war in Vietnam,
including the famous photograph of the self-immolation of the Buddhist monk.
The voice-over tells us that, just as the great powers have surrogate wars, so do
the yakuza. At the end of the fifth film, the series concludes with a sustained shot
of the Hiroshima Dome (Plate 5) and the following voice-over narration: Will the
bitter battles that arise from the strong preying on the weak ever be banished from
the earth?5 Impersonal destruction, the slaughter of thousands from the air, the
cynical manipulation of surrogates: American violence constitutes war without
honor, and the recent outbreak of yet another instance of contagious American

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The nature of violence in Fukasaku Kinjis Jingi naki tatakai

Plate 5 Final shot of Hiroshima Dome.

violence reconfirms the visual clarity and aptness of Fukasakus perceptions of US

military power, giving his films a particular resonance in the present.
In a short essay, Aaron Gerow has acutely articulated perhaps the most important characteristic of Fukasakus Jingi naki tatakai series:
[These films] are. . . .powerful attempts to combat the dominant history of the
modern era through focusing on the underworld events and people usually left
unspoken. . . .If Fukasakus history is not the words frozen onto the records
or the still shots of the news photographer, it is because he emphasizes the
movement that escapes those means, a historical action expressed through a
kinetic style defined by hand-held cameras, canting frames, speedy pans and
zooms, and fast editing. One can say such cinematic action itself is Fukasakus
historiographic methodology.
(Gerow 2000: 2)
Fukasakus impulse to create an alternate history of post-war Japan infused all
aspects of his films. As we have seen, the plots of his movies closely followed real
incidents that occurred in Hiroshima and Kure between 1945 and 1970. From
this material, in cooperation with and in opposition to the screenwriter Kasahara,

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405

he fashioned a series of films that used the genre of the yakuza film to provide a
realistic and politically insightful chronicle of post-war Japanese society in which
violence and coercion were stripped of their former pretense to moral justification.
Despite Fukasakus revitalization of the genre, and a number of fine films
made under his influence, the yakuza film went into decline in the late 1970s.
Fukasaku stopped working in the genre after 1980. However, in the 1990s the
serialized yakuza film as a genre enjoyed resurgence. Perhaps after the work done
by Fukasaku, the yakuza film seemed particularly appropriate to a critique or
exploration of the corruption of modern Japanese society in the post-economic
bubble years. One series followed another. In most, the influence of Fukasakus
work is clearly discernible. In addition, there have been several recent remakes
of the Jingi naki tatakai series. Among these, Shin jingi naki tatakai: bosatsu (The
new war without a code of honor: premeditated murder, Toei,
2003), directed by
Hashimoto Hajime and starring Watanbe Ken, is undoubtedly the most faithful
to the spirit of the original.6 There are also the popular yakuza films directed by
Kitano Takeshi, who has acknowledged his debt to Fukasaku Kinji.
Yet, none of the hundreds of violent yakuza films influenced by Fukasaku is
as radical in their political and moral critique of contemporary society as the
Jingi naki tatakai series. While borrowing many of the techniques established by
Fukasaku to represent violence, almost all revert to form, the use of violence to
create either nihilistic loner heroes or defenders of social order. Perhaps this is
because the younger generations of directors, screenwriters, actors and audiences
did not experience, as did Fukasaku and his team, three decades of futile violence.
In any case, the fact that Fukasaku, in his final complete work, Battle Royale, turned
to allegory to represent violence in the world indicates his disillusionment with
realism as a mode capable of portraying the entirely different order of deceit and
venality employed to manipulate people in the present.
Ohio State University

Acknowledgements
This article was written for the conference on Japanese Film and the War held at the University
of Kentucky, Lexington in March 2003. I would like to thank Professor Douglas Slaymaker for
organizing the event. I would also like to thank the two anonymous referees for Japan Forum for
their perceptive comments and suggestions.

Notes
1. Fukasakus Gunki hatameku shita ni (Toho Co. Ltd. and Shinsei Eigasha, 1972), a bold antiwar film financed in part by Fukasaku himself, provides an introduction to Fukasakus complex
political ideas and to his radical oppositional stance on the eve of his creation of the Jingi naki
tatakai series. It has recently been released by Home Vision Entertainment on DVD as Under the
Flag of the Rising Sun with excellent subtitles by Linda Hoaglund.

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The nature of violence in Fukasaku Kinjis Jingi naki tatakai

2. Facts concerning the Hiroshima wars are taken from Iiboshi (1970).
3. See, for example, Jingi naki tatakai mei serifu, available at: http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/AN45OKD/private/movie/mvj.htm. The screenplays for the first four films are collected in Kasahara
(1998: 8336).
4. The series was released in December 2004 on DVD in a six-disc boxed set by Home Vision
Entertainment under the title The Yakuza Papers. Excellent translations are provided by Linda
Hoaglund. However, the translations here are, with one exception, my own, in part because this
article was largely completed before the six-disc set was released.
5. I use Linda Hoaglunds translation, The Yakuza Papers, Vol. 5, Final Episode, released by Home
Vision Entertainment, 2004.
6. These include Shin shin jingi naki tatakai (The new new war without a code of honor, 2000)
directed by Sakamoto Junji and the Shin jingi no hakaba (The new grave of the code of honor,
2002) directed by Miike Takashi.

References
Gerow, Aaron (2000) Fukasaku Kinji, underworld historiographer, originally published in New
Cinema from Japan News, Vol. 2 (January 2000), posted on Asian Film Connections website
at: http://www.asianfilms.org/japan/gerow2.html, pp. 13.
Iiboshi, Koichi

(1970) Jingi naki tatakai kessen hen: Mino Kozo no shuki yori (War without a code
of honor, the decisive battle chapter: from the notebooks of Mino Koz
o),
Tokyo: Kadokawa
Shoten.
Kasahara, Kazuo (1998) Jingi naki tatakai,Tokyo: Gentosha

Autoro Bunko.
McDonald, Keiko (1983) Kinji Fukasaku: an introduction, Film Criticism 8(1): 2032.
(1992) The Yakuza film: an introduction, in Arthur Nolletti, Jr. and David Desser (eds)
Reframing Japanese Cinema, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 16591.
Neupert, Richard (1995) The End: Narration and Closure in the Cinema, Detroit, MI: Wayne State
University.
Schilling, Mark (2003) The Yakuza Movie Book: A Guide to Japanese Gangster Films, Berkeley, CA:
Stone Bridge Press.
Standish, Isolde (2000) Myth and Masculinity in the Japanese Cinema: Towards a Political Reading of
the Tragic Hero, Richmond, Surrey: Curzon.
Tayama, Rikiya (1991) Fukasaku Kinji, in Gendai Nihon eiga no kantoku-tachi, Gendai kyoy
o bunka
series no. 1359, Tokyo: Shakai Shisosha,

pp. 97104.
Yamane, Sadao (1971) Sengo fukei

e no uramebari (Toward the underside of the post-war scene),

in Ogawa, Toru
(ed.) Genso to seiji no aida, Gendai Nihon eigaron taikei series Vol. 5, Tokyo:
Tokisha,

pp. 5665.
Richard Torrance is associate professor of Japanese at Ohio State University. His recent publications include a translation of Tokuda Shuseis

Arakure, Rough Living (Honolulu: University of

Hawaii Press, 2001), and Literacy and literature in Osaka, 18901940, The Journal of Japanese
Studies 31(1) 2005, pp. 2760. He may be contacted at Torrance.2@osu.edu.