Sympathy for the Underdog

A film in the modern Yakuza genre that can be regarded as a sequel to Japan Organized Crime Boss, partly thanks to several names that reappear in front of and behind the camera. The location, the island of Okinawa, was only to return a year later to complete Japanese sovereignty after a lengthy American occupation after World War Two. The choice of location was also unusual for Toei’s Yakuza films. The reason was that in this film Fukasaku was looking for a background for his characters that had disappeared elsewhere in Japan, namely the mood of chaotic vitality that characterised the postwar years and that played such a major role in his earlier films. When the protagonist returns to Yokohama after ten years in jail, the city has changed beyond recognition into a neat model of bourgeois values, where the local Yakuza gangs are tied down. He decides to cross with his gang to Okinawa to find something of the bustling chaos that once ruled Yokohama too. On Okinawa they clash with three local gangs, but manage to gain the upper hand with the necessary violence. Then a large Yakuza gang from Tokyo gets involved in the struggle and a gang war breaks out. Fukasaku portrays his protagonists very sympathetically, however without taking sides with these crooks, who rest after their bloody slaughters on the side of the swimming pool by their luxury summer houses. Fifteen years after the Japanese capitulation, Fukasaku was only able to shape his radical view of the period immediately after the war in this distorted way. It may be no coincidence that this film marked the end of his cooperation with Tsuruta Koji, who had grown up in the war.