The Bloggomist: My Celluloid Fix
Graveyard of Honor (1975)

Almost a decade ago, Kinji Fukasaku passed away. In his wake, the giant of yakuza cinema remolded the genre and left a wealth of intelligent violent films that riveted the imagination with political intrigue and complex storytelling as enjoyable as was guiltily pleasurable.

Although prolific in his career as a filmmaker, Fukasaku only caught the eye of mainstream America momentarily. Quentin Tarantino rambled neurotically about the outsider auteur who heavily inspired his violent narratives and stylistic approach. Others have stumbled upon Fukasaku’s final melodramatic ode to violence, Battle Royale, through the Flaming Lips’ Yoshimi tour. The band looped the film as their stimulating concert backdrop.

Fukasaku’s contempt for authority came at an early age when he was drafted as a child during World War II. His entire class was forced into military conscription and he found himself a munitions worker at the age of 15. When his troop was under heavy artillery fire, all the children (including himself) were trapped in a pile of rigor-mortised bodies. He felt the cold adrenaline of near-death as he witnessed the devastating casualties of war. The survivors of his class had to secretly dispose of the corpses. It was then that the astute young Fukasaku realized that the Japanese government lied about its involvement in WWII. For most of his career, Fukasaku held a longstanding distrust of and disdain for adults.

GRAVEYARD OF HONOR
Fukasaku championed jitsoroku, a style of yakuza filmmaking known for its gritty, realistic portrayal of Japanese gangsterdom. He took this style to another level, by adapting real-life accounts of yazuka families that flourished in Hiroshima’s black market district. Graveyard of Honor was regarded as the 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 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, is a hell-bent yakuza of the Bushido clan who inexorably challenges authority. He can’t even manage to be on good terms with his own people. As the film progressed, his rebellion becomes symptomatic of the dying Bushido breed, whose ramrod code of honor is irrelevant in the wake of a quickly modernizing Japan.

When Ishikawa’s yakuza family finally ostracizes him from the district, he seeks 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 ever has. But even this relationship doesn’t stave off his inevitable penchant for self-destruction as he becomes enslaved to heroin. His explosive life and death represents the ‘prototype’ yakuza, a conscience nearly obliterated by drugs, violence, and moral depravity.

Yakuza families were dealing heavily in drugs and weaponry bought from the American GI’s as they controlled the black market in a desperate struggle to keep up with the rest of the post-war economy. There were also racial tensions between the Koreans and Chinese expats who were the subject of much fervent discrimination. These minorities 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. His life became the ticking atom bomb still fresh in the community’s psyche, while the U.S. occupation of Japan began its awkward reconstruction of Japanese society.

Fukasaku stylistically shot Graveyard using his 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 and chilling acumen. Fukasaku excavated the hollow soul of a jaded culture fraught with materialism and post-war anxiety; making Graveyard of Honor one of the darkest, most intelligent portrayals of the Japanese black market.

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To see more from Sylvia Adams, visit: http://evilmonito.com/author/sylvia/

Published on 9 November 2009 | |