82 Japan Organised Crime Boss

[Finch]

Two major yakuza factions from Tokyo and Osaka battle over control of Yokohama, using local gangs as their proxies. Amid this violent struggle, Tsukamoto (Koji Tsuruta, Big Time Gambling Boss), the head of one of the local gangs, is released from an eight-year prison sentence. The feud forces him into action, but he learns that those pulling the strings have political connections and that he is up against overwhelming forces. A predecessor to and blueprint for Fukasaku’s Sympathy for the Underdog, Japan Organised Crime Boss also signals the director’s first collaboration with Bunta Sugawara, the later star of Battles Without Honour and Humanity as well as with Tomisaburo Wakayama (The Bounty Hunter Trilogy) and gangster-turned-movie star Noboru Ando (Eighteen Years in Prison).

LIMITED EDITION BLU-RAY SPECIAL FEATURES

New 4K restoration by Toei Company

Uncompressed mono PCM audio

Archival interview with Kinji Fukasaku

Interview with yakuza film historian Akihiko Ito (2024)

Visual essay on Koji Tsuruta’s collaborations with Fukasaku by yakuza cinema expert Nathan Stuart (2024)

Trailer

Newly improved English subtitle translation

Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Time Tomorrow

Limited edition booklet featuring new writing by Stuart Galbraith IV and an archival review of the film
Limited edition of 3000 copies, presented in full-height Scanavo packaging with removable OBI strip leaving packaging free of certificates and markings

[zedz]

I've been focusing on unwatched Radiance discs for the last couple of weeks, and ended up doing a double bill of this and Hokuriku Proxy War. As he's the master of chaotic action, two Fukasakus in a row can be exhausting, but these two are distinct yet similar enough to work well together. It helps that they're the bookends of his vivid jitsuroku eiga period, with all those battles without honour and humanity stacked in between.

The setup is basically the same in both films: yakuza emerges from lengthy stint in prison to find things all messed up because of proxy wars between smaller regional gangs for the benefit of corporatized national criminal entities. It plays out differently in each film, but with similarly nihilistic and bloody outcomes.

This, the earlier film of the two, is the more stylistically measured, though it still proceeds at a headlong pace, with the first four minutes summarizing in furious montage, freeze-frames, stills and headlines an entire feature's worth of exposition - giving the film the feel of a standalone sequel. The plot is elaborate but lucid, with the chaos of the action set pieces manifesting in canted angles and wild activity captured from a remove. By the time we get to Hokuriku Proxy War nearly a decade later, the chaos is all-consuming, with fragmentary, arhythmic montage, cameras participating in the fray, and much less concern for setting up or winding down the violence. Japan Organized Crime Boss is a much stronger character piece, and more satisfying over all, but Hokuriku Proxy War is seething energy from start to finish: two different variants on the same recipe.