My Celluloid Fix: Graveyard of Honor
Toei Studios
(1975)
***
Kinji Fukasaku

Over five years ago, Kinji Fukasaku passed away. In his wake, the giant of yakuza cinema had remolded the genre and left a wealth of intelligent violent films that riveted the imagination with political intrigue and complex storytelling as enjoyable as guilty pleasure. Yet his razor-sharp incision of Japanese culture through the eyes of social deviants elevated him far from such connotations. Although prolific in his career as a filmmaker, Fukasaku only caught the eye of mainstream America momentarily. Possibly from Quentin Tarantino who was heavily inspired by the director or maybe from stumbling upon Fukasaku’s Battle Royale during the Flaming Lips tour in support of their Yoshimi album, when the band looped the film as their concert backdrop.

GRAVEYARD OF HONOR
Championing jitsoroku , a style of yakuza filmmaking known for its gritty, realistic portrayal of Japanese gangsterdom, Fukasaku went even further by adapting his own screenplays from real-life accounts of yazuka families that flourished in Hiroshima’s black market district. While this style very well epitomized the mainstream mold of the yakuza genre, Graveyard of Honor is regarded as the first pivotal success that led to a whole slew of films categorized as the “Toei Yakuza Genre.” The popularity of the style even spurred Fukasaku, himself, to continue Yakuza Papers, his brilliant series on the Japanese crime syndicates.

Graveyard of Honor centers on Rikuo Ishikawa (played by the brash Tetsuya Watari) a gangster whose rise to notoriety was larger than life. Ishikawa, who happened to grow up in the same neighborhood where Fukasku was raised, runs amok the Bushido clan as a hell-bent yakuza who inexorably challenges authority. He couldn’t even manage to be on good terms with his own clan. As the film progressed, his rebellion became symptomatic of the dying bushido breed, whose stern code of honor became hackneyed and irrelevant in the face of a quickly modernizing Japan.

This ultra-violent depiction of a pathological serial killer was emblematic of Japan’s social and political unrest in a post-WII economy. His life became the ticking atom bomb that was still fresh in the people’s psyche, while the U.S. occupation of Japan began its awkward reconstruction of Japanese society. During all of this uncertainty, the yakuza families were dealing heavily with drugs and buying weapons from the American GI’s as they controlled the black market in a desperate struggle to keep up with the rest of the economy. Fukasaku also explored the racial tensions between the Koreans and Chinese expats who were the subject of much fervent discrimination. They rose to create their own gangs which rivaled/integrated with the generational yakuza clans in the Hiroshima district. Then there was Ishikawa, who from out of this turmoil rose to prominence as the textbook psychotic.

When his yakuza family finally ostracized him from the district, he sought refuge with a woman (played by the demure Yumi Takigawa) who he’s raped in the past. Oddly enough, through a series of dysfunctional attempts at a relationship, she is the closest thing to a girlfriend he had. But even this relationship doesn’t stave off his inevitable penchant for self-destruction as he becomes enslaved to heroin addiction. In a drugged up paranoia of his own invention, he actually killed his childhood yakuza buddy, resulting in an all-out shoot-out with the cops. His explosive life and death represented the ‘prototype’ yakuza whose conscience is nearly obliterated by drugs, violence, and moral depravity. His story ultimately shaped the modern-day allegory of the modern man coping with crumbling social traditions in the wake of overwhelming economic growth.

The extended 70’s Trailer of Graveyard of Honor :

The scenes are stylistically shot with Fukasaku’s trademark panache—sudden freeze frames, varying tints for key scenes, daring camera angles, and fast paced violence. Only few films, such as Shohei Imamura’s Vengeance is Mine , can depict a homicidal maniac with as much artistry. With chilling acumen, Fukasau delved into the hollow souls of jaded people, excavated by materialism and post-war anxiety, making Graveyard of Honor one of the darkest, most intelligent portrayals of the Japanese black market.