Battles Without Honor and Humanity: Deadly Fight in Hiroshima

Plot

In 1950 Hiroshima City, Shoji Yamanaka is involved in a fight over cheating in a card game and stabs several men. He is sentenced to two years in prison, where he befriends Shozo Hirono. When he is released from prison, the waitress at a restaurant offers to let him eat for free but a gang led by Katsutoshi Otomo, the rebellious son of Choji Otomo, beat him. He is saved by Otomo senior and is offered to join the yakuza by Muraoka, the waitress Yasuko's uncle. Yamanaka serves under Muraoka's sworn brother Kunimatsu Takanashi, until he is chased out of Hiroshima by Muraoka for beginning a romantic relationship with the widowed Yasuko.

Yamanaka redeems himself a year later by performing an assassination for the yakuza family he was staying with, and Muraoka welcomes him back as a formal member in a ceremony witnessed by Kanichi Tokimori. Katsutoshi Otomo is kicked out of his family by his father for causing problems with Muraoka and aligns himself with Tokimori, however, Tokimori is then banned from working in Hiroshima. Tokimori flees to Kure, while Katsutoshi attacks the Muraoka office starting a war.

In Kure, Hirono's former boss Yamamori pays Hirono and his small family to protect Tokimori while he works to resolve the dispute. However, when Yamanaka shows up in Kure, Hirono decides to sacrifice Tokimori to prevent further bloodshed. Muraoka settles with the Otomo family, on the grounds that Katsutoshi disband his family. Muraoka also gives his blessing for Yamanaka to pursue Yasuko, but soon after calls on him to kill three of Katsutoshi's men who planned to take over the Otomo family and continue war against him. Yamanaka is arrested for the murders and sentenced to life in prison.

Takanashi informs Yamanaka that Muraoka is forcing Yasuko to marry her dead husband's brother, and Yamanaka subsequently escapes from prison. Muraoka makes it seem as if Takanashi was lying and Yamanaka asks to allow him to kill Katsutoshi. While he only succeeds in injuring him, Katsutoshi is arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment. Muraoka then has Yamanaka kill Takanashi under the guise that he lied to Yamanaka about Yasuko. After finding out that Muraoka was the one lying, Yamanaka is cornered by police and shoots himself.

Cast

Production

The second film was ordered on December 21, 1972, before filming was even finished on the first. Toei wanted screenwriter Kazuo Kasahara to depict the Hiroshima war, but Kōichi Iiboshi's articles, on which the films are based, were still being published. Because he did not know the whole story yet and did not want to make another ensemble piece like the first installment, Kasahara decided to tell the dramatic story of Mitsuji Yamagami (name changed to Shoji Yamanaka in the film), a hitman who briefly appeared in the original story. The screenplay took him 65 days to write.

Kasahara flew to Hiroshima on January 10, 1973 for a second meeting with Kōzō Minō, the former yakuza whose journals Iiboshi adapted. However, the material Minō and Yamagami's friend Takeshi Hattori, second president of the Kyosei-kai, provided was not enough. So he collected some interesting stories from the gang who still carried Mino's name.

The writer said he had to make sacrifices to please the audience. Because Hirono was the main character, he had to be in the film, but Minō had never met Yamagami. The events also took place right after World War II, but the black market set from the first film could not be rebuilt in time. So Kasahara changed the time-setting from the chaotic post-war period to the 1950s, making Yamagami/Yamanaka's killing spree seem unbelievable, and forced Hirono to appear where it was not necessary. He acknowledged these weak points of the movie.

Kasahara wrote Yamanaka as a patriotic man who was too young to have fought in the war, so he devoted his loyalty to his yakuza boss and killed with a gun instead of a fighter jet. Director Kinji Fukasaku thought it would be too difficult to make the contemporary youth understand this, and wanted the character to be part of the social class that was left out of the economic growth of the 1950s. Ultimately, a compromise of both their visions was used. Kasahara said that he received letters from fans who saw his vision of the character and that Fukasaku later admitted that he realized the audience could understand the war. The writer originally planned an opening scene where Yamanaka is humiliated after being nearly raped in prison, beginning his killing spree. But Minō was against it, something Kasahara chalked up to the fact that Mitsuji Yamagami was still revered among some of the yakuza, and it was removed with the writer believing the characterization suffered as a result. But among all the films in the series, screenwriter Kazuo Kasahara likes the second the best.

Release

Battles Without Honor and Humanity has been released on home video and aired on television, the latter with some scenes cut. In 1980, the first four films were edited into a 224-minute compilation which was given a limited theatrical release and broadcast on Toei's TV network. A Blu-ray box set compiling all five films in the series was released on March 21, 2013 to celebrate its 40th anniversary.

All five films in the series were released on DVD in North America by Home Vision Entertainment in 2004, under the moniker The Yakuza Papers. A 6-disc DVD box set containing them all was also released. It includes a bonus disc containing interviews with director William Friedkin, discussing the influence of the films in America; subtitle translator Linda Hoaglund, discussing her work on the films; David Kaplan, Kenta Fukasaku, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, a Toei producer and a biographer among others. Arrow Films released a Blu-ray and DVD box set, limited to 2,500 copies, of all five films in the UK on December 7, 2015 and in the US a day later. Special features include an interview with the series fight choreographer Ryuzo Ueno and the 1980 edited compilation of the first four films.