Wild Japan Day 6 - Yakuza Graveyard

Kinji Fukasaku is best known for his iconic and boat-rocking Battle Royale, but in the early seventies he was just as infamous, for directing a series of Yakuza films entitled Battles Without Honour or Humanity, which thoroughly drained any modicum of romantic allure from the gangster genre, presenting the tawdry, harsh and brutal world in unrelenting detail. Yakuza Graveyard, made slightly later, continues the theme of the loss of honour in the post war period, this time focusing on the character of a cop whose relationship with the Yakuza allows him a supply of information, but results in his identity becoming increasingly indistinguishable from the gangs he has infiltrated. As a summary of the plot suggests, this film must have been a huge influence on the burgeoning gangster genre that emerged in Hong Kong a decade later, which often features stories of undercover cops whose identities and loyalties have become confused through prolonged association with the enemy. As in these films the resulting moral ambiguity is the subject of the film as much as a product of the narrative.

Tetsuyo Watari plays the wayward cop, Kuroiwa, whose violent impulses earn him the criticism of his superiors, not for any moral reason but because its damaging their public image. But Kuroiwa, it turns out, is not an exception as it seems the majority of the police have business relationships with the Yakuza; they are just as corrupt and morally righteous to boot. This is borne out by Kuroiwa's discovery of the involvement of some high level detectives in a money laundering scheme and the fact that the police are operating a policy of cooperating with one of the gangs in an attempt to avert a gang war. In such a dog eat dog world, morality is the proverbial horse flogged to death. Alienated from the police Kuroiwa is drawn further into the seedy world of the Yakuza, which is itself experiencing an erosion of its code of honour; taking the wife of a man he has killed as his mistress and becoming blood brothers with a Korean crime lord, who leads the gang that the police have decided to persecute. The fact that he is criticised for his actions only serves to emphasise the hypocrisy with which he is surrounded.

Meiko Kaji (Female Convict Scorpion, Lady Snowblood), who surely deserves the accolade of queen of exploitation, plays a half Korean moll, whose alienated sense of self and encounters with racism have lead her to heroin abuse. These two damaged, divided human beings are drawn to one another, and together form a precarious unit somewhere outside both Japanese society and the Yakuza underworld. Hardly romantic outsiders, however, their brief and violent relationship is ended when Kuroiwa is gunned down by the police, after he kills a Yakuza with whom they are doing business. If his death in the arms of Meiko Kaji is something of a cliche, stretching right back to Jean Gabin's performance in Quai de brumes, it is certainly given more spice with Kuroiwa, defiant to the last, raising his fingers in rage at his killers and to death itself. Kuroiwa's increasingly schitzo actions make the film an interesting but confusing ride, but the its ultimate point is unescapably clear: in this world honour is dead and buried. Fukasaku's cynicism is immaculate, as always.