JAPAN SOCIETY Unleashes Yakuza Chronicles of Sin, Sex & Violence, March 9-19

This season, Japan Society is proud to present the new Globus Film Series, Hardest Men in Town: Yakuza Chronicles of Sin, Sex & Violence.

From March 9 to 19, Japan Society will be screening a series of 15 yakuza films, from 1960s productions featuring chivalrous kimono-clad, sword-wielding gangsters to today’s ruthless gun-toting villains dealing in debt, dark trades and deeds. Featuring films by internationally acclaimed directors such as Takeshi Kitano, Seijin Suzuki, and Kenji Fukasaku (among many others), the series includes a large number of premieres and titles never-before shown in the U.S. Also introducing some of these screenings will be a few very special guests, including writer/director Paul Schrader, author Jake Adelstein, and director Takashi Miike.

The Japanese gangster movie genre through its various avatars, transformations and contradictions, from 1960s productions featuring chivalrous kimono-clad, sword-wielding gangsters and gamblers to today’s ruthless gun-toting villains dealing in debt, hustling hardcore porn and scheming and scamming in dark trades and deeds. Over the past 50 years, they’ve remained snarling, swaggering, tattooed and inexplicably sexy. In the line-up, there will be blood and broken bones, hookers and hopheads, and plenty of juicy political blackmail… in 15 films that rack up the stiffs like Jacobean tragedies and show grand visions of manly amity and betrayal: classics and lesser known titles by Kinji Fukasaku, Takashi Miike (Dead or Alive), Hideo Gosha (The Wolves), Takeshi Kitano (Outrage), Rokuro Mochizuki (A Yakuza In Love, Onibi: The Fire Within) and Sydney Pollack (The Yakuza), among other offerings you can’t refuse.

The violent romantic world of the yakuza (the Japanese mafia) steeped in cryptic ritual and customs involving full-body tattoos and missing digits, has long excited the imagination, decades before viewers started existing on a diet of Sopranos and Boardwalk Empire melodrama, and has been one of the mainstays of the Japanese film industry since the 1960s. Harking back to the days when samurai still embodied traditionalist values of honor, selfless duty (giri) and the noble warrior spirit (ninkyo) on the silver screen, the shadowy demimonde of organized crime (which included wandering gamblers and lowly peddlers) rivaled with the noble swordsmen as the representatives of honor and heroism, in the context of a rapidly changing society trying to come to terms with a shameful defeat. In the darkness of movie theaters, they became the very picture of superhuman macho cool and reptilian menace.

Check out which films will be screened after the jump.

The Yakuza – Directed by Sydney Pollack

Onibi: The Fire Within – Rokuro Mochizuki

The Wolves – Hideo Gosha

The Walls of Abashiri Prison (pt. 3): Longing for Home – Teruo Ishii

Brutal Tales of Chivalry – Kiyoshi Saeki

Theater of Life: Hishakaku – Tadashi Sawashima

Blood of Revenge – Tai Kato

Cops Vs. Thugs – Kenji Fukasaku

Battles Without Honor and Humanity A.K.A. The Yakuza Papers (pt. 3): Proxy War – Kenji Fukasaku

Youth of the Beast – Seijin Suzuki


Dead or Alive – Takashi Miike

A Yakuza in Love A.K.A. Villainous Love – Rokuro Mochizuki

Ryuji – Toru Kawashima

Yakuza Wives – Hideo Gosha


Outrage: The Way of the Modern Yakuza – Takeshi Kitano