My own attraction to the reek of mud drew me to the yakuza all-nighters, starring Takakura Ken or Tsuruta Koji. Ken-san bore a remarkable resemblance to the rugged country boys in Donald’s private pinup collection. These films followed a predictable format, observed with the solemnity of a religious rite: the hero, provoked by intolerable humiliations meted out by the bad guys, would always die alone in a final scene of mayhem. Toei studios, which had strong connections to real yakuza gangs, were the main producers of these movies. Mobsters tend to be conservative. The bad guys were crooked bankers, corrupt politicians, or greedy construction bosses. They wore pinstriped business suits with flashy ties. Ken-san and other yakuza heroes wore kimonos. They were the last real warriors, faithful to the ancient codes of chivalry: loyalty, self-sacrifice, and justice. They fought with swords against the cowardly bad hats who invariably fought with guns.
The politics of the classic yakuza movie were not so much right wing as aggressively antimodern. A pure, traditional Japan, which was almost wholly fictional, was being corrupted by modern capitalism and Western ways. This caricature of history goes back to the mid-nineteenth century, when U.S. gunships forced Japan out of her state of relative isolation. Then the helterskelter economic boom of the 1960s, as well as bruised feelings about the years of U.S. occupation, gave the fantasy a new life. Which is why Ken-san, an essentially reactionary hero, was an idol to left-wing student protesters too. They also longed for a pure society, which could only exist in myth.
Without having the same yearnings as the student activists of the 1960s, I, too, felt the pull of the yakuza myth, which in its classical form was already a thing of the past. Japanese gangster pictures, like American Westerns, which in many respects they resembled, had become darker, more cynical, by the 1970s. Perhaps my taste for the earlier films had something to do with the attempt to flee from my own background, but I think there was more to it than that. Who, with any romantic sense at all, would not root for the men in kimonos against the men in suits, for the swords against the guns? The lament in the classic yakuza picture was the universal one, for paradise lost.
And so I, too, cheered lustily when Ken-san slipped his samurai sword from his waistband, and set off, alone, to face certain death at the hands of his enemies’ guns. The suicidal mission would be accompanied by a rousing song on the sound track, usually sung by the hero himself, celebrating the beauty of death as a final act of vengeance against the corrupt Westernized villains. The kamikaze spirit still lingered, thirty years after the war. Even the sleeping bums would wake up for the climax and shout at the screen: “Go, Ken-san! Die like a man!” 引自 Chapter Four
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