Battles Without Honour and Humanity

Kinji Fukasaku's Battles Without Honour and Humanity opens on the mushroom cloud that devastated Hiroshima. The camera tilts, travelling up the stem before it arrives at the boiling cap of the atomic firestorm, the reveal accompanied by blaring, brassy horns. Fukasaku's film tracks a group of demobbed Japanese soldiers scratching out a living following their return to this shattered, occupied city. The young men fight their way across the open air markets that have congealed on these famished, irradiated ruins, seeing off thrashing mobsters and the American soldiers who roam in packs, preying on screaming civilian women. Although long passages of Battles revolve around the effortlessly charismatic Bunta Sugawara, it could hardly be said that his Hirono is the film's main focus. The low-level gangster spends as much time off-screen and in jail as he does at the centre of the frame. Instead, Fukasaku's film largely adopts an anthropological approach: an embedded camera that runs alongside its subjects, cramming into tiny rooms for a decisive meeting or jostling for an advantageous view on the constant quarrels. 

Literally post-apocalyptic, Battles describes an effort to act out an antiquated, pre-war idea of criminal chivalry. It's a stock kind of gallantry that, very obviously, didn't really exist. The film's many characters are enthusiastic novices with no clear connection to the organised crime fraternities they are emulating. Their ceremonial initiations are parroted and incomplete, each a strange sort of lark performed by arrested children who are playing at being hard-bitten men. The stakes are the same though, regardless of individual experience. It's not that Fukasaku's film betrays any great affection for how these things used to be done either. The older men who prey on these youngsters are greedy and self-centred, obviously the products of a system premised on the relentless exploitation of an imaginary but inflexible class system. The veterans reflexively rat out their subordinates, playing them off against each other and ensuring that they themselves can stake a claim to the lion's share of profits. In this way the police, usually an antagonistic force in crime cinema, become almost immaterial to the unfolding events. Since their dragnets are frequently directed by a snitch, they nearly always get their man. Battles Without Honour and Humanity then concerns the dawning realisation that genuine loyalties are forged between peers over decades, and cannot easily be recanted.