Drug Connection

The American mafia and the Taiwanese triads converge on Japan after the recession has weakened the yakuza. A cocaine smuggler with a past in the French Foreign Legion (Perfect Days star Koji Yakusho) finds himself courted by the foreign gangs.

After conquering the Japanese video rental market, Toei made inroads into the US with a number of co-productions, starring actors such as Viggo Mortensen and Russell Crowe before they became famous internationally. Drug Connection is notable for the starring role by Koji Yakusho, who spent much of the early 1990s in V-Cinema playing unhinged gangsters, before becoming a star in the likes of Shall We Dance and Shohei Imamura’s Cannes winner The Eel. His co-star here is Sho Kosugi, the Japanese émigré martial arts actor who starred in Cannon Films’s 1980s ninja movies.

With its violent portrayal of a rapidly internationalising Japan and the rise of a new urban underclass, Drug Connection foreshadows much of the Japanese indie cinema of the 1990s, notably the films of Miike Takashi. Its high-strung characters grasp wildly at any available straw, unsure of what the future brings in a country in the throes of a very real recession.

– Tom Mes

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