Dis­cov­er this era-span­ning yakuza epic and its con­tem­po­rary remake

“Rikio Ishikawa, the hero of this film, was born in Aug 6, 1924.” So reads the text that opens Kin­ji Fukasaku’s Grave­yard of Hon­or, as we see black-and-white pho­tographs from the very real Ishikawa’s child­hood, and hear inter­vie­wees com­ment on how he was a con­stant cry­ba­by, how ​“he was dif­fer­ent from the oth­ers”, how he had ​“a hard core to him”, and how he ​“always want­ed to be a yakuza” (a line which appears to have influ­enced Mar­tin Scorsese’s 1990 gang­ster biopic Good­fel­las). Final­ly some­one com­ments, ​“What made him turn into a mad dog? It wasn’t the war. He was just crazy.”

This intro­duc­tion estab­lish­es that Grave­yard of Hon­or belongs to the same sub­genre – Jit­suroku eiga, lit­er­al­ly ​‘actu­al record films’ – that Fukasaku had first pop­u­larised with his Bat­tles With­out Hon­or and Human­i­ty and its var­i­ous sequels. Unlike the ear­li­er Ninkyo eiga (‘chival­ry films’) which glo­ri­fied the chival­ry and codes of hon­our among pre­war yakuza or their pre­de­ces­sors the baku­to, these new­er gang­ster films drama­tised the thug­gery and dis­hon­our of post­war yakuza in a style akin to doc­u­men­tary, even draw­ing their sto­ries from real life.

Ishikawa (Tes­tuya Watari) may be this film’s ​‘hero’ in the sense that he is its con­stant focus, but he is far from an exem­plary fig­ure. On the con­trary, he is impul­sive and aggres­sive, appet­i­tive and enti­tled. While the vio­lence and chaos that he brings may emblema­tise the pro­found winds of change that swept through Occu­pied Japan in the imme­di­ate after­math of World War Two, this trou­ble-mak­ing pro­tag­o­nist beats, rapes and kills with unre­strained aban­don, in the end bit­ing every hand that feeds and burn­ing every bridge behind him. He is the ulti­mate rebel with­out a cause, fight­ing friends as well as ene­mies, and destroy­ing every­one around him – and even­tu­al­ly him­self – with his arbi­trary onslaughts and lat­er his hero­in addiction.

One of the inter­vie­wees in the film’s intro­duc­tion had said of Ishikawa: ​“When I was doing time with him, he once said he was like a bal­loon. Mean­ing he’d keep ris­ing high­er until final­ly he’d burst.” Bal­loons will occa­sion­al­ly appear in the film, as recur­rent reminders of this prefa­to­ry image, but in a sense Grave­yard of Hon­or is less about the rise of Ishikawa’s bal­loon than its implo­sive col­lapse in slow motion. His final sui­cide, a plum­met from the roof of a prison build­ing, encap­su­lates in a sin­gle scene this character’s tra­jec­to­ry from the start.

As his unpre­dictable, destruc­tive actions leave bewil­dered those mem­bers of the old guard whom he does not out­right kill, Ishikawa shakes up and burns down the sys­tem in which he has spent his trau­mat­ic for­ma­tive years, even if he is inca­pable of offer­ing a con­struc­tive mod­el for what might be rebuilt from the ash­es. Accord­ing­ly, the film’s final wide shot of con­struc­tion works in Tokyo can come only after the scene of Ishikawa’s death.

Where Grave­yard of Hon­or is a peri­od film look­ing back from the mid ​’70s to the late ​’40s, Takashi Miike’s 2002 remake Shin Jin­gi no Hak­a­ba (lit­er­al­ly ​‘New Grave­yard of Hon­or’) is updat­ed to con­tem­po­rary times. And while it does not requote the line from Fukasaku’s film about the burst­ing bal­loon, that line still res­onates in a film whose protagonist’s ear­ly rise and grad­ual, spi­ralling fall are made to frame the burst­ing of Japan’s asset price bub­ble in 1991.

Rikio Ishikawa was a real per­son whose life and death is recon­struct­ed in Fukasaku’s film, but in Miike’s reimag­in­ing, set some four decades after the real Ishikawa met his end, the pro­tag­o­nist – now min­i­mal­ly renamed Rikuo Ishi­mat­su (Goro Kishi­tani) – is clos­er to myth than real­i­ty, and trans­forms, as the film goes on, into a demon­ic fig­ure. Yet in his final moments, with which the film opens as well as clos­ing, the cape-like blan­ket in which he wraps him­self atop a prison tow­er may make him resem­ble a super­hero, but does not lend him com­men­su­rate pow­ers of flight, so that he is ulti­mate­ly bound at least to the real­i­ty of gravity.

In his ear­ly twen­ties, in the film’s ear­li­est chrono­log­i­cal scene, Ishi­mat­su is rapid­ly ele­vat­ed from low­ly dish­wash­er to made man after he inter­venes to save yakuza god­fa­ther Sawa­da (Shin­go Yamashiro) from an attempt on his life. Resent­ed as an upstart by the oth­er mem­bers of Sawada’s gang, Ishi­mat­su wins Sawada’s admi­ra­tion for his effi­cien­cy as an attack dog. But this crim­i­nal ​‘yup­pie’ will become a lia­bil­i­ty once Japan’s bub­ble has burst. For his mer­cu­r­ial tem­per and dri­ven rapac­i­ty cre­ate bloody may­hem wher­ev­er he goes, and repeat­ed­ly cause him to turn on his clos­est allies, even as his exces­sive ram­pages coin­cide with Japan’s ​‘lost decade’ of eco­nom­ic stasis.

In case the nation­al alle­go­ry is missed, in a scene where Ishi­mat­su has tak­en some of his for­mer col­leagues hostage, and mur­dered oth­ers, to achieve his ill-defined ends, he is shown draped in the Japan­ese flag. For he is an embod­i­ment of the immense dam­age for the coun­try in that peri­od of stag­na­tion, where down­siz­ing, despair and destruc­tion ruled all.

This is what makes both ver­sions of the film so fas­ci­nat­ing: the way in which they take this jug­ger­naut of a char­ac­ter and let him run riot through two very dif­fer­ent peri­ods of cri­sis in Japan’s his­to­ry. Yet what unites them is their nar­ra­tive com­mit­ment to a repel­lent char­ac­ter with few if any redeem­ing fea­tures. The man at the cen­tre of both these films is a liv­ing incar­na­tion of tox­ic mas­culin­i­ty – even if that term did not yet even exist when Fukasaku made his ver­sion. Seri­al­ly rap­ing his ​‘wife’ and shoot­ing, stab­bing and club­bing his com­rades at arms, he is on a nihilis­tic, nar­cis­sis­tic dash upwards that is simul­ta­ne­ous­ly a race down­wards, and he brings near every­one whom he encoun­ters crash­ing with him.

Near the end of Fukasaku’s film we learn that Ishikawa had writ­ten the words ​“What a laugh! Thir­ty years of fren­zy!” on his cell wall short­ly before tak­ing his final plunge – a graf­fi­to that turns his wild exploits into a joke, and him into an anar­chic Jok­er. In Miike’s ver­sion, the joke is on him, as a cyn­i­cal coda to Ishimatsu’s death shows the sur­viv­ing old guard get­ting right back to busi­ness as usu­al, while the younger gen­er­a­tion is still pay­ing the price in miss­ing fin­gers and jail time. For all the sound and fury of this lone wolf’s fren­zied reign, his rebel yell has fall­en silent as soon as it was raised, and noth­ing has changed.

Grave­yards of Hon­or is avail­able in a two-disc Blu-ray set from Arrow Video, con­tain­ing both Fukasaku’s and Miike’s ver­sions, from 7 September.