Battles Without Honor and Humanity: Police Tactics
No one will tolerate a war on their doorstep for long. Battles Without Honor and Humanity: Police Tactics is the fourth entry in the Battles Without Honor and Humanity series of yakuza crime dramas based on true events about the advent of post-World War II organized crime in Hiroshima, and the key players in this deadly and complex escalation of violence, mayhem, and betrayal. Taking place just after the third installment, Proxy War, Police Tactics addresses the inevitable crackdown on the yakuza by the police, representing Western Japan's refusal to permit these outlaws to run amok any longer.
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Set at the beginning of the 1960s, the blood feud between the various families in Hiroshima has become a way of life, and long-standing grudges seem to be the most important thing in the lives of these crime lords. Shozo Hirono (Bunta Sugawara), betrayed by his former boss, Yoshio Yamamori (Nobuo Kaneko), has now become the leader of his own family, and all delusions of false alliances constantly teased in Proxy War have since fallen away. Even the sniveling Noburo Ochimoto (Takeshi Katō) is distrusted wholly by all who know him, so while he and Hirono maintain a begrudging alliance, it is obvious it is not a relationship built to last. Hirono is now forced to grab for allies where he can, including his bond with Shinichi Iwai (Tatsuo Umemiya) of the Akashi clan from Kobe. But as Yamamori--who has since taken control of the Muraoka clan--is allied with the Akashi's rivals, the Shinwa group, even Hirono's alliances are not quite enough. He implores the historically neutral Tomoji Okajiri (Asao Koike) for assistance; Okajiri is a wily man who understands how Hirono and Iwai need his support, but is more interested in trying to broker peace than tip the scales. The problem is that Okajiri is entering this conflict at a juncture where reason is no longer a consideration, and the go to response to gain the upper hand includes a constant barrage of assaults, bombings, and assassinations. And as the newer generation of yakuza, struggling to find direction in the warmongering of their leaders, accidentally slay innocents in the fray, the public outcry is so loud that the police can no longer turn a blind eye on letting the underworld seep forth onto the surface any longer...especially with the Olympics pending a year later. In effect, the police become the wild card in this war, and with their resources and legal authority, the age of gangland violence and blood feuds in Western Japan is closing fast.
In any other kind of crime drama, Police Tactics would likely follow the perspective of a police protagonist confronting the depraved and vicious violence perpetrated by the yakuza. Their relentless war means that the gangsters have made themselves too big of a target to ignore, and these bosses, so concerned with getting vengeance against their rivals to ensure the stability of their families end up ruining their organizations in the process. Police Tactics marks the downward action of a series of conflicts stretching almost two decades, which as the film elucidates, cost the lives of many, wounded more, and resulted in the arrests of around fifteen hundred people. The best parallel to this large-scale intervention by the law over the gangland violence and subsequent police response would be that of the Prohibition era of the United States, with larger-than-life underworld legends and bogeymen like Al Capone and Frank Nitti, with their yakuza counterparts being Yamamori and his captain, Akira Takeda (Akira Kobayashi). The kind of "crime doesn't pay" message of Battles Without Honor and Humanity--especially in Police Tactics--from the point of view of the criminal element is similar to some of the great mafia films by Martin Scorsese, such as Goodfellas and Casino, also adapted from true events. Much of the violence and gunfights involve characters who are rarely if ever introduced or named, unlike prior entries, making these fallen "warriors" appear more disposable. As the Battles Without Honor and Humanity series is principally from the point of view of Hirono, it goes to show just how disconnected he has become with the realities of the street-level bloodshed he was knew first-hand. Where an assassination was a decisive moment to turn the tides in the earlier films, in Police Tactics, men ambush one another with such frequency that it is representative of a new kind of warfare built on terror rather than any delusions of honor; there is no promise of security. One especially surprising attack at a hot springs underscores the savagery of these frequent acts of carnage--after the assassin shoots his victim, the blood violently sprays onto the camera.
Unlike in the preceding films of the series, Hirono spends little to no time in the actual heat of battle, not out of a lack of bravery but because he has come to accept that as a central figure in this elaborate game of feints and guerrilla tactics, making himself vulnerable is more of a liability to his organization than a benefit. This represents the great paradox for Hirono, a man who became a yakuza because of a willingness to put himself in the line of fire, who now must maintain his place under guard and is defenseless when the police come to arrest him on an unrelated assault charge, ratted out to the police by fellow crime lord, Yamamori. This is not to say that Police Tactics is a bloodless affair--far from it--although in this film contains side stories that are a tangent to the larger war at hand. For instance, a young woman named Mieko (Mayumi Nagisa) is smuggling handguns for the Hayawaka family, but when she runs across an old flame, the slimy Yasuki Fukuda (Akio Hasegawa), she seduces him for information, which in turn leads to a spike in violence that only speeds up the bloody conflict between the Uchimoto gang and Hayakawa's. A more sorrowful subplot involves a teenage boy named Hiroshi Yazaki (Ichiro Ogura), who works as an amateur bookie for the Gisei group's Hidemitsu Kawada (Shinichiro Mikami), but is supported and defended by the better respected Shoichi Fujita (Hiroki Matsukata). While Fujita's health is failing, and Yazaki has befriended him, Kawada influences the young bookie--whose poor family lives in the rundown hovels of Motomachi, also known as the "A-bomb slums"--to assassinate Fujita before his time, which only brings his family more misfortune and ruin. In a way, yakuza films are most similar to the American western style of film--they are filled with a lot of shoot outs, missions of vengeance, greedy crooks, and men with assorted codes of honor. With that in mind, Police Tactics resembles Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, in that these aging outlaws are forced to come to terms that their time is ending, and that the world will no longer will tolerate their overt violence anymore. Young firebrands like Hirono at the end of World War II have become tired generals, weary of the high cost of their wars of attrition, their explosive rage leaving nothing but loss behind.
Recommended for: Fans of a slice of life adapted from the stories of an actual underworld war in the 1960s in Hiroshima between the assorted families of yakuza, and the inevitable intervention by the law to finally snuff the flames of that war in the streets. It is a bloody conflict, filled with frequent violence, portrayed as pointless by design, to underscore how meaningless the conflict truly is.
In any other kind of crime drama, Police Tactics would likely follow the perspective of a police protagonist confronting the depraved and vicious violence perpetrated by the yakuza. Their relentless war means that the gangsters have made themselves too big of a target to ignore, and these bosses, so concerned with getting vengeance against their rivals to ensure the stability of their families end up ruining their organizations in the process. Police Tactics marks the downward action of a series of conflicts stretching almost two decades, which as the film elucidates, cost the lives of many, wounded more, and resulted in the arrests of around fifteen hundred people. The best parallel to this large-scale intervention by the law over the gangland violence and subsequent police response would be that of the Prohibition era of the United States, with larger-than-life underworld legends and bogeymen like Al Capone and Frank Nitti, with their yakuza counterparts being Yamamori and his captain, Akira Takeda (Akira Kobayashi). The kind of "crime doesn't pay" message of Battles Without Honor and Humanity--especially in Police Tactics--from the point of view of the criminal element is similar to some of the great mafia films by Martin Scorsese, such as Goodfellas and Casino, also adapted from true events. Much of the violence and gunfights involve characters who are rarely if ever introduced or named, unlike prior entries, making these fallen "warriors" appear more disposable. As the Battles Without Honor and Humanity series is principally from the point of view of Hirono, it goes to show just how disconnected he has become with the realities of the street-level bloodshed he was knew first-hand. Where an assassination was a decisive moment to turn the tides in the earlier films, in Police Tactics, men ambush one another with such frequency that it is representative of a new kind of warfare built on terror rather than any delusions of honor; there is no promise of security. One especially surprising attack at a hot springs underscores the savagery of these frequent acts of carnage--after the assassin shoots his victim, the blood violently sprays onto the camera.
Unlike in the preceding films of the series, Hirono spends little to no time in the actual heat of battle, not out of a lack of bravery but because he has come to accept that as a central figure in this elaborate game of feints and guerrilla tactics, making himself vulnerable is more of a liability to his organization than a benefit. This represents the great paradox for Hirono, a man who became a yakuza because of a willingness to put himself in the line of fire, who now must maintain his place under guard and is defenseless when the police come to arrest him on an unrelated assault charge, ratted out to the police by fellow crime lord, Yamamori. This is not to say that Police Tactics is a bloodless affair--far from it--although in this film contains side stories that are a tangent to the larger war at hand. For instance, a young woman named Mieko (Mayumi Nagisa) is smuggling handguns for the Hayawaka family, but when she runs across an old flame, the slimy Yasuki Fukuda (Akio Hasegawa), she seduces him for information, which in turn leads to a spike in violence that only speeds up the bloody conflict between the Uchimoto gang and Hayakawa's. A more sorrowful subplot involves a teenage boy named Hiroshi Yazaki (Ichiro Ogura), who works as an amateur bookie for the Gisei group's Hidemitsu Kawada (Shinichiro Mikami), but is supported and defended by the better respected Shoichi Fujita (Hiroki Matsukata). While Fujita's health is failing, and Yazaki has befriended him, Kawada influences the young bookie--whose poor family lives in the rundown hovels of Motomachi, also known as the "A-bomb slums"--to assassinate Fujita before his time, which only brings his family more misfortune and ruin. In a way, yakuza films are most similar to the American western style of film--they are filled with a lot of shoot outs, missions of vengeance, greedy crooks, and men with assorted codes of honor. With that in mind, Police Tactics resembles Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, in that these aging outlaws are forced to come to terms that their time is ending, and that the world will no longer will tolerate their overt violence anymore. Young firebrands like Hirono at the end of World War II have become tired generals, weary of the high cost of their wars of attrition, their explosive rage leaving nothing but loss behind.
Recommended for: Fans of a slice of life adapted from the stories of an actual underworld war in the 1960s in Hiroshima between the assorted families of yakuza, and the inevitable intervention by the law to finally snuff the flames of that war in the streets. It is a bloody conflict, filled with frequent violence, portrayed as pointless by design, to underscore how meaningless the conflict truly is.