On August 15, 1945,
Japan was defeated by the Allied Forces
and became an occupied country.
The American military came to Japan as an occupying force.
That was the start of Japan’s postwar period,
which began in 1946 and went on for several years.
During that period, the Japanese underwent a great change.
The idea of dying for the emperor that they had held until then
was completely scrapped.
They were in a different time,
and the Americans brought the idea of democracy with them.
So people were released from totalitarianism under the emperor,
as well as from the militarism that had gripped the nation,
and they immediately embraced the completely opposite idea of democracy.
When this change was going on,
Fukasaku was in his late teens, nearing 20,
an age when a person begins to have his own ideas,
and he wondered why such an extreme change was taking place.
He pondered this on his own,
and he must have understood
that emperor worship was not necessarily good for Japan’s people.
He had been told by adults to be ready to die for his country,
but after the war, they changed their position completely.
Adults who had worshipped their emperor as a god were now saying
that the emperor was a human being
and that they had to live democratically from then on.
So adults changed their position almost diametrically.
As a result, Fukasaku felt an indescribable emptiness and distrust toward adults.
He used to talk about this often.
What Mr. Fukasaku wanted to do in his films,
including Battles Without Honor and Humanity,
was, as he himself said,
rooted in his memories of adolescent experiences.
I think they're strongly reflected in all his films.
All the action sequences are certainly amazing,
but it's in the sympathetic depiction of people of the lowest rank
that Mr. Fukasaku's real personal perspective comes through.
There were people who chose to change as postwar Japan changed,
and there were those who stood firm
and felt nothing would be gained by changing.
So there was that kind of schism in postwar society.
I believe Fukasaku couldn't take a stand on either side.
I think he was torn between the two.
That's why lead characters in his films are not idealized human beings.
As Japan's postwar society underwent transformation,
his films expressed a sort of protest against it.
But he couldn't say that the change shouldn't take place either.
So there was a dilemma.
Battles Without Honor and Humanity became a hit
because of the mood of the period.
It was released in 1973.
Japan's economic growth was reaching its peak
around the time the film came out.
So people were living
with a certain degree of comfort.
Around the end of the 1960s,
the student political movement erupted all over the world.
In Japan, there were student uprisings in 1968 and 1969.
These uprisings among the young
were another form of protest against postwar society.
When society stabilized after the war,
all these objections and doubts people felt towards it
poured out in different forms.
I don't think people in general were conscious of having such feelings,
but they felt them somewhere deep down in their hearts.
And Battles Without Honor and Humanity
connected with the mood of the period
and became a hit as a result.
When I was junior-high-school age, Hollywood movies shown in Japan
were heroic-action star vehicles
with Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger in the lead.
And I thought, "These movies just don't speak to me."
Then rental video stores began to open,
and the first film I saw on video was Battles Without Honor and Humanity.
I was blown away by it.
For one thing, its leads were equivalent to the rogue warriors in Seven Samurai.
In addition, although the movie starred
such big-name stars as Bunta Sugawara and Hiroki Matsukata, among others,
it was an ensemble piece.
And instead of the stars, it was the lesser known actors,
who as a group would later be called the "Piranha Corps,"
such as Hideo Murota and Takuzo Kawatani,
who energized the film with their supporting roles.
In other words, the stars were more narrative characters,
whereas the yakuza characters of the lowest rank, called "bullets,"
who were killed meaninglessly one after another,
were the real focus of the movie.
This different point of view astonished me.
Even when portraying a hero, other characters are always involved,
so his films are ensemble dramas or ensemble pieces.
So even though there is a hero,
he is also just one character among all the other characters.
When the hero appears on screen
in the company of other characters,
the audience watching the movie isn't just looking at the hero,
but also at the other guy to whom the hero speaks, for instance.
Sometimes this guy is more interesting than the hero,
and then the audience's perception of this guy changes.
And I think that kind of depiction is a sort of realism.
Focusing on just one character
as if with a spotlight
doesn't reflect what happens in real life at all.
Human drama is more complicated and messy.
And trying to adhere closely to reality
is what makes Fukasaku's directing interesting.
He focuses on lesser characters as well as on the leads.
These are characters who get stabbed or shot
and die right away
and disappear from the screen.
In other words, they're insignificant yakuza underlings.
When Fukasaku directs actors playing them,
he tells them to step closer to the camera.
When several characters are in a scene with the lead character,
actors playing supporting characters stand a little behind the lead.
But Fukasaku would say,
"You back there, why are you hanging back? Step forward."
Then that actor would step forward.
And the hierarchy of the characters is thrown into disorder as a result.
Battles Without Honor and Humanity has that kind of compelling chaos.
In the movie, Boss Yamamori, wonderfully played by Nobuo Kaneko,
has these men who are his underlings,
and under them are still more lower-ranking underlings.
So there is a hierarchy of sorts in their world,
but it becomes totally disordered in the film.
And that's what Fukasaku wanted to depict.
I think Mr. Fukasaku felt we have to step back and reexamine
these things called morality, humanism and ethics.
I think that feeling he had is a common strain in all his films.
These are not the issues that movies should tackle.
Instead, dealing with such issues as human weakness or shame
or national shame
should be the role of moviemaking.
And actors who work in movies depicting those issues should feel similarly.
I sense that kind of feeling from his films.
Bunta Sugawara is also someone
who is basically antiestablishment,
though when asked for an autograph, he writes "Jingi."
Going up against great power or oppressive force
seems to be-
how can I put it? -
the way he prefers to live.
I think this is something he shares with Mr. Fukasaku.
When Toei first began making movies,
period pieces were one of its main products.
Crew, costumes, set production, and locations for making period pieces
were easier to provide in Kyoto.
So Kyoto was the best place to shoot Toei's main product.
Therefore, its studio in Kyoto was the main studio
when Toei first started its movie production.
Then the popularity of period pieces gradually waned,
and as Toei was searching for a new direction for their products,
the genre of yakuza movies was born.
There was a genre of yakuza movies called ninkyo movies
that preceded Battles Without Honor and Humanity.
Ninkyo movies were set in the Meiji and Taisho eras
and focused on the heroic aspect of the profession called yakuza.
Stars of this genre were
Koji Tsuruta and Ken Takakura.
What you might call the aesthetics of yakuza,
the willingness of yakuza to fight and even die
to save people or for the honor of their boss,
was depicted in ninkyo movies as if it were something beautiful.
And this kind of movie was made for a long time.
But after about a 10-year run of such movies,
the story line became a rehash of the same old thing.
Until then, to sum it up in a nutshell,
ninkyo movies depicted stoic men who suppressed all desire
and lived only for loyalty toward their boss or people.
And just as the movie-going public was getting sick of this kind of movie,
a film with a completely different take on the genre came out.
The movie depicted men who lived true to their desires
and didn't hesitate to betray their friends or even their boss.
That's the kind of world portrayed in Battles Without Honor and Humanity.
And in the film, the bosses don't care about their men either.
They think it's okay to screw them over.
These aspects of yakuza life had never been portrayed before.
The movie presented a completely different view of yakuza,
and audiences loved it.
The movie became a huge hit, which led to a series of sequels,
as well as many other movies of a similar type.
Toei reacted very-
Toei is a studio
that reacts swiftly to audience response,
so it decided to scrap ninkyo movies and go with this new yakuza genre.
The new movies were still about yakuza, but in a completely different way.
And Toei churned them out one after another.
One reason that Battles Without Honor and Humanity
is such a fantastic movie
is undeniably the way Fukasaku directed the film.
But before that happened, Kazuo Kasahara, the screenwriter,
wrote the wonderful screenplay.
His work in creating the film's drama cannot be overlooked.
The original source of the film was a memoir written by someone
who had been in the middle of a conflict among yakuza in Hiroshima.
He wrote the memoir while serving his jail time.
So the movie is based on his memoir.
Normally, you read the memoir and write a script just based on that.
But Kazuo Kasahara is a man who loves realism.
So when the movie project came up,
the screenplay obviously had to be written based on the memoir,
but he also researched everything in the book.
Kasahara actually went to Hiroshima
and met with many yakuza, including the memoir's author,
and interviewed everyone mentioned in the book.
I heard it wasn't an easy task, but he managed to do it.
And he dug up more stories about the conflict,
some of which had not been in the book.
He picked up many interesting stories
and inserted them into the screenplay.
Kasahara is three years older than Fukasaku,
so he and the director shared
a certain feeling about the postwar period.
When a man like Kasahara writes about yakuza in Hiroshima,
he conducts thorough research to make it realistic.
Because the script was so solid,
Fukasaku's job was to shoot a film that brought the script to life.
And he injected his own brand of realism
that he had been building through his past film projects.
The production period was very short.
In addition, as I said earlier,
Mr. Fukasaku was a director
under contract to the Toei studio in Tokyo,
and to have him work in Kyoto- Although there was some precedent,
it was unusual for a director under contract in Tokyo
to make a movie at the Kyoto studio.
Mr. Fukasaku shot
Battles Without Honor and Humanity in such an environment in Kyoto.
The length of the shoot at the time,
from the actual beginning of the shoot to the end,
must have been probably 35 to 40 days.
It couldn't have been longer.
So the shoot was really hectic and chaotic.
What I find interesting about Fukasaku as a director
is that he was a studio filmmaker through and through.
He made movies within the confines of mass-produced commercial films.
That's how he worked.
And I don't think
he really thought of venturing out of those confines.
He always worked at Toei.
He went along with Toei's film production system
and tried to find projects that interested him.
He didn't care for ninkyo movies, so he tried not to make them.
Even when he made one like Kaisan-shiki,
he made it into something other than a typical ninkyo movie.
So he would change things around and make something different.
He worked under the studio system
where commercial films were mass-produced.
And although he was part of that system,
or, you might say, worked within that system,
he made his own films.
Japanese directors whom I find interesting
are those who work the way Fukasaku did.
I don't know what influence Mr. Fukasaku's films had in the world.
People in different countries see them differently.
Now we have many younger filmmakers who are really good,
but there weren't many in Mr. Fukasaku's generation,
because there was an established basic formula.
There was the star system,
and good versus evil was a major premise of entertainment films.
No one challenged that formula until Mr. Fukasaku shook it up
by making films that were the complete opposite of that.
I think that's a contribution Mr. Fukasaku brought
to violent films or actions films.
He was a revolutionary in action films.
His theory of moviemaking
is probably not what you would learn in film schools.
It was dictated by his nature.
So regardless of whether it went against the rules or not,
he wove together those things to which he was attracted by nature.
I can sense his strength in doing that.
Even now, people who have seen the movie talk about it.
I think
it's because a certain portrait of postwar youth was brilliantly drawn
through conflict among yakuza in the movie.
During the postwar period,
there were shortages of various kinds, both emotionally and materially.
The film shows men in that context hacking their way through on their own.
People who saw this portrayal when the movie first opened
felt it was just as cutthroat as when they were young,
and they strongly identified with the movie.
The violence that pervades the yakuza genre
and a portrait of postwar youth
were skillfully blended together by Mr. Fukasaku
and made the movie a big hit.