HOKURIKU PROXY WAR (1977)

Hokuriku Proxy War / 北陸代理戦争 is the final entry in Kinji Fukasaku’s sequence of jitsuroku eiga, a subgenre of yakuza sagas based on true crime scenarios, which his films defined. It also marked Toei Studios’ last “actual record film” inspired by the real lives of gangsters. They stepped back from such edgy material because this movie came too close to the truth, sparking a series of events leading to an actual yakuza execution.

This nicely cleaned-up high-definition Blu-ray is the latest in a recent raft of Kinji Fukasaku films to be released by boutique labels—Radiance in this case. So, I’ve been learning and writing quite a bit about one of Japan’s most interesting and unpredictable directors who richly deserves this renewed interest.

Although he’d made a handful of notable yakuza movies beforehand, Japan Organised Crime Boss (1969) is often cited as the first in Fukasaku’s jitsuroku eiga sequence as it’s the earliest to involve what would form his ensemble of Toei-contracted cast and crew. The far superior Sympathy for the Underdog (1971) was effectively a redux and these two movies featured a glacially cool yakuza boss (Kōji Tsuruta in both) coming out of prison to find the world had moved on. Gangland no longer adhered to its traditional honour codes and loyalties could be bought just like any commodity as boundaries between yakuza, big business, and politics were dissolving.

So, it’s a refreshing change that Kawata Noboru (Hiroki Matsukata), the protagonist in Hokuriku Proxy War, is not cool. He’s a hothead. Though he can certainly be cold. On his release from prison in 1968, he expects to be compensated for taking the rap and is furious that his clan boss, Yasuura (Akira Nishimura), has no intention of honouring a promise. Instead of handing over control of the gambling for the lucrative bike and speedboat racing events in their Hokuriku territory, he gives Kawata the job of running the concession stands. So, Kawata abducts Yasuura, buries him up to his neck in the frozen ground and repeatedly drives what looks like a US military jeep toward his head, its tyres slipping dangerously close in the snow. We will learn that Kawata is fond of this shocking method of intimidation and torture, which he employs more than once.

Yasuura is understandably shaken by his experience and gives his younger brother Matani (Hajime Hana) the task of dealing with Kawata. However, Kanai (Sonny Chiba) a regional boss for a bigger Osaka-based yakuza clan sees an opportunity to exploit this apparent rift in the Hokuriku hierarchy and decides to ‘help’ by sending about 50 enforcers to solve their problems. This is a thinly veiled show of superiority intended as the opening gambit in absorbing Yasuura’s outfit.

Yasuura is getting old and feels his control slipping, so he readily aligns with Kanai. Matani also plays along by arranging a false meeting with Kawata at a coffee shop where the imported assassins lie in wait. There’s enough gaming of inter-clan dynamics to keep hardened enthusiasts of the gangster genre enrapt. While these realistic intricacies add richness to the story, the core of the narrative remains an emotional one that doesn’t require audiences to follow them too closely. However, it’s an element that adds value to subsequent viewings.

The ensuing coffee shop fight, with pistols, knives, and swords, is chaotic and visceral, spilling out of the claustrophobic café through a shattered window into the snowy landscape. The red of blood stands out nicely against the bright white as adversaries stagger among the stark black bars of rhythmic tree trunks. Cinematographer Tôru Nakajima’s frenetic hand-held camerawork blurs the action and adds a real sense of frantic panic. The fight choreography is far from slick and captures the violent chaos one would expect from a deadly yakuza conflict. We’re only 20-minutes in but it looks like the end for Kawata as he takes a bullet or two and several sword strikes. The odds were certainly stacked against him but Kanai’s cronies scatter when the police arrive, having been alerted by his lover, Kiko (Yumiko Nogawa).

As soon as he’s out of intensive care, it’s Kiko and her brother, Takashi (Takeo Chii) who smuggle Kawata from the hospital. They take him to a safe house in Wajima near his hometown of Mikuni, a region where the deep snow blankets the land right down to the rugged coast. Although Fukasaku doesn’t linger on the landscape, it becomes an omnipresent expression of hardship and struggle. The visual contrast echoes Kawata’s uncompromising judgement of what is acceptable and what is not which, for him, has no grey areas.

So now he becomes the almost-killed hero who must slowly but surely recuperate to be reborn with focus and renewed clarity of purpose. It’s a recurring trope, originally borrowed from fables and folklore, that became a cinematic mainstay since Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961), reconfirmed in Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (1964). Kawata’s recovery is realistically slow giving him time to develop feelings for Nobu (Yôko Takahashi), the younger sister of Kiko and Takashi who tends to him. While Kiko is manipulated into transferring her loyalty and affection to Matani in the hope of protecting Kawata, Nobu reciprocates his affection, and they become a formidable duo.

These are not Quentin Tarantino-styled gangsters but raw human beings with all the foibles that come with that—anger, arrogance, desperation, and fear. He may not be a traditional hero, but we find ourselves rooting for Noboru Kawata whose swaggering bravado passes for heroic in the context of his situation. He’s certainly brave enough to walk right into the middle of a rival clan gathering to exact vengeful justice upon his uncle who betrayed him. While he’s there, he also dispatches a haughty henchman who goads him without expecting such a swiftly decisive response. It’s one of the more satisfying bad-guy deaths… until we near the climax.

For his unilateral one-man rebellion, Kawata ends up back in prison where he’s almost killed by inmates from other clans. It’s also a neat narrative device to progress events as we jump a few years to his release in 1973. We don’t see his arrest or trial because that would needlessly slow the action but can guess that he got a relatively lenient sentence because his actions were understood as self-defence. After all, he was ridiculously outnumbered, and the odds were clearly against him.

Hiroki Matsukata’s lead performance is compelling and convincing. Even through the bluster of confrontations we can see his mind at work in the way his eyes scan and fix on different details or the faces of others as he continually weighs the situation. Through the first act, his stance is dynamic, and he always seems to be leaning into the action. After barely surviving the vicious attack, his posture becomes more hunched and defensive. He doesn’t miraculously heal from one scene to the next, he’s coughing blood after exertion, and carrying deeper psychological scars too. He’s rarely still and often rocks with the energy of rage he contains—a mannerism observed by scriptwriter Kôji Takada during his research interviews with Hiroshi Kawauchi, the real yakuza boss whose autobiographical anecdotes provided the basis of the story.

Takada spent time with Kawauchi and the men of the real Hokuriku yakuza and discussed plot ideas and scenarios with them in his quest for authenticity. However, he didn’t simply juxtapose episodes from real life to create a believable narrative. That would’ve been either too brutal or too boring. He used his research to support a cleverly plotted thriller that remains partly a fable about rebirth, redemption, and one man’s struggle against the repeating cycle of fortune that normally favours those already in positions of power. No one else except Kawata, and eventually Nobu, seems to have any freedom of choice. The yakuza are bound by honour codes and a burden of obligation—ninkyo and giri—to a strictly hierarchical structure that’s really a pressure-cooker version of broader society.

Kôji Takada was also interested in exploring gender dynamics in the overbearingly masculine world of the yakuza and wanted to push the women to the fore and the two female leads rise admirably to the challenge. Yumiko Nogawa was already ten years into a career that would span six decades and had worked with several notable directors including Seijun Suzuki and Nagisa Ôshima. Here, her portrayal of Kiko is nuanced though tightly restrained, resigned to being controlled by male-dominated circumstances that move her from one man to another like a piece in a chess game that isn’t the queen. She doesn’t get many chances to show off her range but is at her best in the scene when she seemingly shifts her affections away from Kawata to protect him, knowing full well that she will also lose him.

By contrast, Yôko Takahashi runs through the full gamut of emotions as Nobu. In early drafts of the screenplay there was a younger brother, but despite some initial resistance from Kinji Fukasaku, who was interested in further exploration of homosocial relationships, Kôji Takada changed it to a sister, thus enabling an unflinching exploration of gendered power gradients. The female leads are both excellent and the film would have benefited from affording them even more screen time, but among the very capable cast, Yôko Takahashi is the standout performance, ranging from slight gestures expressing unspoken feelings to unrestrained outpouring of raw emotion. She has a childlike innocence but also an emotional honesty, along with a threat of feral ferocity churning just under the surface. Indeed, she turns out to be as feisty, hot-headed, and deadly as Kawata as they unleash some adrenaline-fuelled righteous vengeance upon the really bad guys—-we’re talking rapists and those without a shred of honour.

Hokuriku Proxy War is realistically convoluted and there is some helpful narration to explain some of the complexities, but it is not necessary to understand all the dynamics between the various clans to grasp the plot. The superfluous details only serve to add a sense of confusion and chaos. Fukasaku often enhances these feelings by cramming his frames with dense detail. An individual may be visually hemmed in on all sides, eliciting a sense of claustrophobic peril. There is little chance of escape from this way of life, and ever-impending death. Of all Fukasaku’s jitsuroku eiga that I have seen so far, Hokuriku Proxy War ranks with the best and has benefited from the director’s experience making the game-changing Battles Without Honour and Humanity (1973-75) series.

Though there is an abundance of blade-sharp, deadpan humour in the dialogue, and the finale may not be as bleak as his previous yakuza thrillers, there is still a gloomy sense of inevitability, perhaps heightened by the knowledge of what happened to Hiroshi Kawauchi just a couple of months after filming wrapped: The real yakuza boss who inspired Kawata’s character was executed at the same coffee shop used as a location for the attempted execution of his fictional counterpart in the movie—a movie that came too close to the truth.

JAPAN | 1977 | 98 MINUTES | 2.35:1 | COLOUR | JAPANESE

Limited Edition Blu-ray Special Features:

• Limited edition of 3000 copies, presented in full-height Scanavo packaging with removable OBI strip leaving packaging free of certificates and markings.
• High-definition digital transfer.
• Uncompressed mono PCM audio.
• NEW interview with actress Yôko Takahashi (2024, 15 mins). In which she recalls filming Hokuriku Proxy War around the same time as appearing in Kon Ichikawa’s Queen Bee / 女王蜂 (1978), both productions shot in rural locations around Japan. Cast solely on the strength of her promotional photograph and résumé, without an audition, she was initially daunted by the role but very pleased by the extremes of emotion she managed to convey. She reminisces about a few of her fellow cast members and also comments on the depictions of yakuza men in the films of Kinji Fukasaku.
• NEW interview with screenwriter Koji Takada (2024, 19 mins). A thoughtful and philosophical interview in which he compares his older, wiser self with the rash, insensitive young writer he was back then. However, he also believes the best line of dialogue he ever wrote was delivered by Yumiko Nogawa in Hokuriku Proxy War. He explains how he structured the script in Shakespearean style and, as well as a battle between yakuza clans, he included a battle between men and women by writing the two female leads more prominently, despite initial misgivings from Fukasaku. He recalls researching the story by meeting and interviewing real yakuza, including Hiroshi Kawauchi, and witnessing some of their methods of intimidation. He wanted realism but maintains the story is a fiction akin to a fairytale.
• Yakuza film historian Akihiko Ito on the real-life Hokuriku Proxy War murder case (2024, 15 mins). He discusses his book covering the film’s production in parallel with the real-life events that happened during and in the immediate aftermath, leading to the murder of Hiroshi Kawauchi. He points out the authentic filming locations where real events occurred and recounts some of the research undertaken by Koji Takada, who saw himself as competing with Kazuo Kasahara, who had scripted Battles Without Honour and Humanity.
• Trailer.
• NEW and improved English subtitle translation. When compared to past prints, the new translation lends greater clarity and uses character names more correctly.
• A reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Time Tomorrow.
• Limited edition booklet featuring newly translated archival writings on the film. Not available at the time of review.

Cast & Crew

director: Kinji Fukasaku.
writer: Kôji Takada.
starring: Hiroki Matsukata, Yumiko Nogawa, Yôko Takahashi, Shin’ichi Chiba (as Sonny Chiba), Hajime Hana, Akira Nishimura, Mikio Narita & Kô Nishimura.