Battles Without Honour and Humanity

Fukasaku’s breakthrough film thanks to a fortunate conjugation of his favourite themes and ideas. The script, based on a novel by Iiboshi Koichi about the prison memoirs of the former Yakuza Mino Kozo (Hirono Shozo in the film), tells the story of the first decade after the war, now in terms of a Yakuza gang war in Hiroshima. In the aftermath of the war and after a violent period as black- market trader a demobilised soldier joins a small Yakuza gang and finds himself in a gang war. Inside his own gang too, a power struggle develops and in no time he becomes embroiled in a sequence of deceit and murders between enemies and friends. From the opening shot of the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima, Fukasaku uses documentary techniques that give the film a stirring rhythm with their unpolished images pushing on the outbursts of violence and machinations of power. It turns the film into a tragic metaphor for the lost innocence of a generation, doomed to grow up in the underbelly of a society suffering the chaotic consequences of the Second World War. The title, Battles Without Honour and Humanity, indicates that Fukasaku wanted to engender a profound about-turn in the Yakuza genre. Where Yakuza films from the Toei studio had previously not strayed from the adage that a Yakuza defends the code of honour at any cost, Fukasaku showed how the code of honour was trampled on by incessant deceit and mutual betrayal between gang members, bosses and other riffraff. The harsh realism of this lifelike drama made the film a box-office success and Fukasaku was famous overnight. The success led to a long series of sequels and also caused an about-turn in the Yakuza productions of the Toei studio, that since then have been based more and more on true stories.