Japanese Crime Film Series
PANELISTS: Osawa Jō (National Film Center, Japan) Philip Kaffen (Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow of East Asian Studies, Comparative Literature, New York University) Inuhiko Yomota (Visiting Researcher, Kyoto University of Art and Design) MODERATOR: Aaron Gerow (Professor of Film Studies & East Asian Languages & Literatures, Yale University) Still courtesy of Toho, Ltd.
A world premier with English subtitles of a silent masterpiece by renowned director, Ingaki Hiroshi: Outlaw yakuza, Chūtarō, splits with his gang to look for the mother who abandoned him when he was a child in the sprawling metropolis, Edo (now Tokyo). There, modernity clashes with such traditional values as loyalty, and perhaps even with the bond between mother and her child. The screening will be accompanied with live music performed by the trio, Limbergino. Lone Wolves and...
Jirō is the second brother of the Kuroki family. He has just been released from jail and is already scheming a new heist. For this mission he hopes to recruit his younger brother, who is referred to as Sabu by his friends. This is a difficult task, as Sabu resents his brother for his lack of concern toward their mother who has just died. Sabu is nevertheless lured to take part in his brother’s plot when Jirō offers him what seems to be a large sum of money. However, this is not going to be a happy family operation. First, the target of the plan is a powerful yakuza gang, led by a ruthless...
On September 22, 1947, a typhoon is approaching the northern island of Hokkaido when a fire breaks out in a pawnshop in the town of Iwanai. Just before that, two men had fled the shop and joined another before heading off to Hakodate, a city that was in pandemonium trying to rescue survivors of the shipwrecked Aomori-Hakodate ferry. One of those helping is Detective Yumisaka from Iwanai. When he returns home, he finds out that the fire, apparently set to cover up a murder-robbery, has burned down much of the town. The warden of the Abashiri Prison visits and suggests that two recently...
A detective in civilian clothes arrives in a rural town to investigate crimes involving two local yakuza families, Ōoka and Kozuka. These two organized crime groups violently compete over territory, and over prostitution, drugs and gambling markets in the area. It is soon revealed that the local mournful bartender used to be a yakuza member as well, but after his wife died, allegedly in an accident, he has taken an oath to quit in order to become a katagi, the yakuza term for a law abiding citizen. The relationship between him and the detective becomes warmer after the detective raises...
In a run-down tenement in Edo’s Ryōgoku district, the much-disliked landlord Kanbei is found murdered one night. Suspicion first falls on Bunkichi, who always verbalized his resentment against Kanbei, and on the rōnin Shinozaki Genzaemon, who owed the landlord money. The police officials Rokunoshin and Hachigorō begin questioning all the colorful inhabitants of the tenement. Since Kanbei was killed with a sword, they first focus on Genzaemon and another rōnin, Yokoyama Kyūma. Kyūma, in love with Genzaemon’s daughter Okyō, decides to falsely confess to the crime because he thinks her father...
Set in Nagoya in the late nineteenth century, the film revolves around Hibotan no Oryū, a young and beautiful “female gambler” who gets apprenticed to the Nishinomaru, a local yakuza under constant threat of the Kanahara, a rival yakuza in collusion with a powerful politician, Furuta. Jirō, a son of the Nishinomaru’s boss, is in love with Yaeko, a daughter of the Kanahara’s head. With the help of Hanaoka, the Kanahara’s lieutenant, Oryū helps the young couple run off together to Osaka, which instigates the all-out violent war between the two syndicates....
The narrative consists of a complicated structure involving a number of flashbacks. The film centers on a notorious killer named Shiozawa, who is feared by yakuza clans but disguises his identity by managing a small Japanese restaurant. One day, Shiozawa meets Keiko, who starts to hang around him once she finds out he has money. Keiko begins working at his restaurant while making vain attempts to seduce Shiozawa. Meanwhile, Shiozawa contracts with the Kimura-gumi yakuza clan to murder Ōwada, the boss of rival clan, for 20 million yen. When Shiozawa succeeds in killing Ōwada by his trained...
Maki, working a dead-end job at the Sakura Hotel, comes across a murder in one of the rooms and discovers a mysterious key near the body, with a note suggesting that it is one of three. In the next morning’s paper, he learns that the murdered man was an assistant at a government ministry who had just gotten out of prison for his involvement in a bribery scandal. What’s more, 150 million yen have gone missing! Thrilled with this unexpected opportunity to change his life, Maki becomes a new man, much to the chagrin of his girlfriend Akiko, who works at a flower shop at the hotel and dreams of...
The story centers on a police detective, Murakami, whose pistol is stolen from him while he rides a trolley through Tokyo, a city still struggling to recover from the devastation of World War II. Murakami is overcome with guilt at the loss of his weapon, particularly when reports roll in that it is being used in a series of holdups, one ending fatally. Murakami devotes himself to tracking down the man who has his gun, going undercover to penetrate the seedy postwar black market and hunting down every possible lead. When Murakami finally encounters the criminal, he discovers that they share...
Tomu Uchida’s “Keisatsukan” tells the story of a young police man, Itami, who met his high school friend, Tetsuo, at a roadblock. As the two rekindled their friendship through a series of beautiful flashbacks of their high school days, the audience are entangled into the complex relationship between between an honest police officer and a gangster Lone Wolves and Stray Dogs: The Japanese Crime Film, 1931 - 1969 Ever since the success of the French crime film Zigomar in 1911,...
