"When you follow Fukasaku's work, there's this " "You feel his sympathy towards the weak and oppressed." "Along with that sympathy, you also feel his antipathy for those who are strong or domineering, or have power." "And there's something else that's unique in his films:" "Those who go wrong and fall or stray from the right path are treated with great sympathy in his films." "These are the kind of people we call losers or the fallen." "But he has very deep compassion towards them." "Fukasaku's films show this compassion he has for such losers, the men who fall." "And that's what I find really touching." "The film that shows that the most" "Graveyard of Honor shows that aspect in the most concentrated way." "Like hell you're free!" "Quick!" "Run!" "Name's Rikio Ishikawa." "I'm with the Kawada gang!" "Mr. Fukasaku once told me in passing," ""I actually don't like violence."" ""What I really want to make are love stories, "he said." "At the time," "I didn't understand why he said that." "But thinking back on it now, I understand what he meant." "Mr. Fukasaku really wanted to make love stories." "His years as a young man coincided with the time when nothing was pretty or beautiful in Japan." "The country was in shambles after the war." "That was the environment he lived in from the age of 15 through 30." "Japan was in almost complete ruins." "In that period in our country, there wasn't anything that resembled today's romantic TV dramas." "That's why he said what he really wanted to film were love stories." "For Kinji Fukasaku - and this applies to Battle Royale as well - to quote his own words," ""Violence is like a parasite." "As I lived through the war, my identity as a person till the age of 15 was formed, and it is firmly a part who I am." "Therefore, I cannot disapprove of violence completely. "" "I think violence is a fundamental part of humanity." "Like our belief in love, peace and friendship, violence is intrinsically within us as a contradictory force." "The issue we have to deal with is how much violence should be allowed and expressed." "By tackling that issue, Fukasaku tried to delve deeper into who we are." "And what he hated most was that peace and righteousness have a tendency to put a lid on stinky, festering things." "He hated that the most." "He thought those unpleasant things must also be looked at when we think about peace." "So neither Battle Royale nor Battles Without Honor and Humanity should be rejected just because violence is their theme." "If we do that, then we're only closing our eyes to violence." "Rather, we should look at it straight on and then consider what peace is." "And through Battle Royale and Battles Without Honor and Humanity," "I hope people will think deeply about what friendship is." "There is violence depicted in my films, of course." "After a film of mine was shown," "I was actually confronted by a woman, a total stranger." "She rebuked me by saying, "Why did you make a movie like this?" "I have a child, but I can't show this kind of movie to my child." "Have you any idea what harm this movie would do to a child's education?"" "And I couldn't come up with a reply to dispute her point." "So I told Mr. Fukasaku about this incident and asked him what he would have said to the woman if he were in my position." "Mr. Fukasaku was calm as ever, as if such an incident were a daily occurrence, and answered me coolly," ""'What is this idea of education that gets shaken by a violent movie?" "Is the education you're giving your child so fragile?" "'" "That's how I would have replied to her."" "And I thought he was absolutely right." "I completely agreed with his reply." "Naturally, a child's education should not be such a shaky thing." "What kind of education is it that gets shaken by a violent movie?" "I think that was how Mr. Fukasaku honestly felt." "This may be overstating it a bit, but I think Mr. Fukasaku felt that way toward postwar Japan's entire educational system." "Education that gets unsettled by one violent movie." "What is that?" "Just about a week before Japan's defeat in the war," "Fukasaku's hometown was " "It's on the Pacific coastline." "An American fleet appeared off the coast and began to fire these huge cannons." "At the time, he was 15 years old, and he was assigned to serve in a factory" "as part of the mobilized work force." "One day a bombardment by American warships destroyed the factory where he was working." "When he went to see what had happened, he found the factory destroyed." "Workers in the factory were killed by the attack, and their bodies were everywhere." "He and other 15-year-olds like him were then ordered to remove the bodies." "Fukasaku was one of those boys who had to do this unpleasant job." "The fact that the Americans caused such destruction was obviously a real shock to him." "He realized that people can die so easily and be reduced to scattered body parts instantly." "Having to clean up those body parts, he experienced that harrowing reality at the age of 15." "I believe that experience left an indelible mark" "deep in his mind that stayed with him as he grew older." "For example, the black-market scenes" "Mr. Fukasaku was born in 1930, so he was 15 when World War II ended." "He was too young and couldn't fight in the war." "But in this young boy's mind, although he wasn't fighting in the war, he must have felt the effects of war very intensely." "Then the war ended, just as he thought he'd soon reach fighting age." "He felt thwarted, and then he saw all these battered soldiers returning home, and the country was in ruins." "I'm not sure if his hometown of Mito suffered air raids, but the country was in a devastated state." "So having witnessed all that- he was very particular about the setting for the black market." "We created a set of a black market for the film, and the film's lead character walks through there." "But the way the set was dressed to look dirty by the set design team didn't satisfy Mr. Fukasaku." "He yelled at us, "This is no good!" "You guys got it all wrong!"" "So we tried our best to make it look even filthier, but he said merely looking filthy wasn't enough." "He said this sense of all kinds of human sadness and emotion needed to be felt in the streets of the black market." "Then he began to chew up fruit and other food and spit it out as he walked the set's streets." "And he stomped and ground banana, orange and apple peels into the ground to make the set dirtier." "He said that you had to get the permeating smells of various things like spit to create the feel of a real town." "Saying something to that effect, he began to dirty up the set by himself." "So we followed him and copied what he was doing." "Since my generation was born and grew up in postwar Japan, we saw dirty postwar Tokyo." "But it's an unpleasant memory for us." "We didn't like how our town looked when we were kids." "But Mr. Fukasaku brilliantly recreated that unpleasant look." "He created scenes evoking the look and feel of the period." "There was definitely a sense of realism, with its permeating smells, on that set." "I felt it came from Mr. Fukasaku's boyhood experience." "There's a scene of a small room in an attic." "Rikio and Chieko are talking in the scene, and outside the window we see a red balloon caught on a power cable." "It's a very tender and unexpected moment." "There's always a tender scene like that in Mr. Fukasaku's violent films." "In shooting the red balloon through the window," "Mr. Fukasaku was really particular about the dirt and grime on the windowpanes." "He wanted the windowpanes to be cloudy from dirt and grime, and through them we see the power cable and the red balloon caught on it." "And the balloon couldn't be new and full of air." "It had to be a bit deflated." "It took forever to make the windowpanes dirty." "We on the set design team would do it, and he'd say it looked too clean." "He said the dirt on the windowpanes accumulated over years, that they didn't get that way overnight." "The cloudy windowpanes should convey the sense of time in terms of years, not days." "So we brought mud and sprayed it on the windowpanes, and then we sprayed water on it." "After that we sprayed dust, which we then lightly brushed off." "That's how we created the look of old, grimy dirt." "It took a long time." "The film's release date had already been set, and everyone was working round the clock." "We were actually shooting and editing the film simultaneously." "But Mr. Fukasaku had us work for hours just to get the right grimy look." "The lead character in Graveyard of Honor is a hopeless case." "He's a real disgrace, even in the world of yakuza." "He gets crazy and violent all the time." "He kills his sworn brother and attacks his own boss." "His behavior is unacceptable as a yakuza." "He continues to spiral downwards and becomes a drug addict, and his wife ends up getting killed, or, rather, kills herself." "In short, he becomes one of society's failures." "He falls all the way to the bottom." "It's sympathy towards such losers in society that Fukasaku really" "wanted to portray in this film." "Graveyard of Honor depicts how a good-for-nothing guy kept spiraling downwards in postwar Japan," "how his fall went from bad to worse." "How he continued his undignified descent." "I think those are the things the film depicts." "People's sense of values changed drastically." "The government told its people that the war was over." "Individualism was in and totalitarianism was out." "But average people didn't know how to cope or what to do." "As people searched for a new way to live, what Mr. Fukasaku saw in that turbulent period was that people managed to survive, just like yakuza in the movies, by putting their lives on the line." "I think that kind of energy common folks had is what Mr. Fukasaku focused on in making the film." "The yakuza world depicted in the film could be seen as a representation of modern-day Japan." "In other words, there are those who are used like the lowest ranking soldiers," "and there are those who have grown rich and use those soldiers to do their dangerous or dirty work." "That kind of dual structure, which is one aspect of Japan's capitalism, is shown through the world of yakuza in the film." "When one person uses violence against another, both sides feel emotions." "I fucking spoiled you!" "His films seem to say, "Were you aware of that fact?"" "Don't mock me!" "Old Hollywood movies may have shown this aspect of violence." "People go through emotional experiences when they use violence." ""Don't you want to see this?"" "That's what Mr. Fukasaku was saying in his films." "It's entirely different from cold-blooded killings by a hit man for business." "Nor is it like killing a great number of people with a push of a button." "When a person uses violence against or kills another, the attacker and the attacked both experience emotions, emotions that are incredibly complex but that also reveal a fundamental part of humanity." "Such emotions come out." "So please understand, through Mr. Fukasaku's films, that such emotions exist." "I myself had my eyes opened through his films." "Out of my way!" "All the action sequences are certainly amazing, but it's in the sympathetic depiction of people of the lowest rank that Mr. Fukasaku's real personal perspective comes through." "I couldn't believe this film was made as a commercial feature." "It's a depressing film about a guy beyond salvation, but when you see the film, there's something compelling about it." "I think that's a unique quality of Fukasaku's film making." "Normally, you wouldn't want to watch such a downbeat and hopeless film." "You wouldn't want to go near it." "But those unappealing qualities somehow make the film appealing." "It's an amazingly paradoxical film in that sense."