OKINAWA YAKUZA WAR (Toei, 1976)


Okinawa Yakuza senso

D: Sadao Nakajima. P: W: Fumio Konami, Koji Takada. Ph: Shigeru Akatsuka. M: Kenjiro Hirose. S: Hiroki Matsukata (Nakazato), Sonny Chiba (Kunigami), Mikio Narita (Onaga), Takeo Chii (Ishikawa), Tatsuo Umemiya (Kaizu)

“The strongest ones protect our land. That’s how it should be”

From the moment Sonny Chiba, in swaggering Terry Tsurugi mode, lays waste to a restaurant on rival turf, pinning its owner’s face beneath his boot, the animalistic actor embodies the fierce, destructive energy that courses through this blistering yakuza saga.


Scar-faced, sneering or snarling, dressed in army fatigues where his contemporaries wear suits, drunkenly throwing karate shapes in a nightclub, Chiba’s Kunigami is the combustible element that threatens to destabilise the fragile equilibrium among yakuza gangs in Koza City. The situation is described in terms that could apply to Kunigami himself: “A volcano that could explode any time.” It does, frequently, with messy results.


In a commercial sense, the Sixties was the golden age for yakuza cinema, dominated by ninkyo eiga – ‘chivalry films’, generally set before the Second World War. With its frenetic scenes of violence and pervasive nihilism, Nakajima’s film laps from the same trough as the new-wave jitsoruku (‘true record’) productions that rudely broke from tradition, pioneered by Kinji Fukasaku and perfected by the same director in his Battles Without Honour and Humanity series (also produced at Toei).


The story is ripped from the headlines. Fukasaku had broached the tensions surrounding Okinawa’s handover to the Japanese by the American occupying forces in his 1971 Sympathy for the Underdog. Nakajima’s film similarly employs a character fresh out of prison as a moral focus, and offers an approximation of what were then ongoing events – the uneasy alliance of native gangs, the incursion of the big mainland groups and the ensuing internecine conflict – presented with the urgency and luridness of tabloid prose.


The script sketches the yakuza’s ruthless social Darwinism, the idiosyncrasies of regional rivalry. The mutual resentment and contempt of mainland gangsters and provincial upstarts fuels the fire that has been simmering, we learn, since Kunigami’s deputy, Nakazato, eliminated territorial rivals to open up Koza City. Yet the real driving force of the plot is an escalating sense of chaos, as the façade of ‘brotherhood’, of peaceful co-existence, is sundered by greed and one-upmanship.


Of the principal characters, jailbird Nakazato appears keenest to preserve a code of honour that is mocked all around him by the plotting of unscrupulous rivals – from Ishikawa, always spoiling for a fight, to the polished and wily Onaga, who never dirties his hands – or else honoured in the breach, as when Kunigami orders the castration of a Nakazato man over a relatively minor infraction. Kunigami watches the punishment with supreme indifference, eating an ice cream while the victim is emasculated.


As in many examples of jitsoruku, the ‘hero’ – in this case Nakazato – occupies that position purely by default. The much-travelled Hiroki Matsukata (Battles Without Honour and Humanity, ad nauseam) paints in subtle shades a man in an invidious position, his loyalty to the dangerously erratic Kunigami stretched taut as Machiavellian adversaries pull him this way and that. In a motif reminiscent of Hideo Gosha, Nakazato is compared unflatteringly to a dog: derided by Kunigami as a pet of the mainlanders after he begs their forgiveness for a murder committed by his superior; belittled as a wild beast by the other bosses. This is apposite: Nakazato and his dwindling pack of followers end up living rough and scavenging weapons as the various factions manoeuvre for supremacy.


The power plays become quite tortuous, the complex pattern of brittle alliances difficult to follow. Again, this was common among jitsoruku, as is the ferocity of the set pieces through which the major players’ fates are settled, if not the wider tensions resolved. Nakajima, active in yakuza cinema since the Sixties (among his early works was the 1966 Yakuza Hoodlums, one of Matsukata’s first big roles), films the action in a dynamic manner – very similar, perhaps consciously so, to the style of Fukasaku – propelled by wah-wah-heavy funk. The mayhem peaks with a high-speed shootout on the waves, handing Nakazato an ambiguous victory. The real Okinawa yakuza war would rumble on for a few more years.1


The pacing doesn’t allow for much examination of character (or the sorry lot of women in this hyper-macho environment – Nakazato’s wife resorts to selling herself to a brothel to raise funds for his campaign). This is not such a detriment, however, given the conviction of the performances; you can almost smell the pheromones, the sordid motivations. This is especially true of Chiba, aggressively devouring every scene in which he appears. Kevin Grant

1 Matsukata and Chiba re-teamed in 1978 for another film on the subject, Okinawa: The Ten-Year War


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