The films of Beat Takeshi

Beat Takeshi has written, directed and starred in a string of gangster movies that have developed a cult following in American art houses. This article will consider the four that are generally available in video: "Violent Cop," "Fireworks," "Boiling Point," and "Sonatine." It will also discuss Takeshi's ties to real-life gangsters--the yakuza--and their considerable role in Japanese business and politics.

Takeshi Kitano got the nickname Beat from his days as a standup comedian, when he performed as one of the two Beats. He has also had a prolific career as novelist, poet and television talk-show host. All this combined with his extensive movie-making career make him something of a one man industry, a combination of Stephen King, Woody Allen and David Letterman. Throughout his career, he has been closely associated with yakuza, whom he has never attempted to distance himself from in public, but at the same time who receive less than flattering portrayals in his various films. His ability to elude retribution would seem to be connected to his distinctive ability to insult people in an entertaining manner. Furthermore, it is Japanese society as a whole that ultimately serves as his satirical target rather than the gangsters, who ultimately serve only as pawns in a dirty game.

I personally find "Violent Cop" the most satisfying of the four films considered here. It is "Dirty Harry" transposed to Japanese society. Unlike the "Dirty Harry" series, Takeshi shows no interest in elevating his cop into some kind of reformer forced to break rules in order to restore ethical norms. Playing the violent cop in his customary deadpan fashion, Kitano is no moral paragon. He is a deadbeat who borrows money from his partner with no intention of repaying, a gambler, heavy drinker and chain smoker. Professionally, he is not above planting evidence, especially against the yakuza hit-man who has become his nemesis in a case involving drugs and corruption in his own precinct house. After a long-time partner and friend, who has been supplying the yakuza with drugs, is murdered, he goes on a crusade to wipe them out. It is revenge rather than morality that fuels his quest.

The final scenes of "Violent Cop" culminate in a showdown between the avenging violent cop and the hit-man and his gang, who have kidnapped his mentally ill sister. Dialog is kept to a minimum and the violently choreographed shootout is accompanied by a sweetly melancholy Satie-like melody that is in absurd contrast to the bloodletting. In essence, this is the esthetic of a Takeshi movie. It conjoins ultraviolence with a highly refined cinematography that owes much to the formal elegance of Ozu, creator of "Tokyo Story" and a host of other sensitive masterpieces.

Another key ingredient of a Takeshi film is the dry sense of humor that permeates every scene. Unlike American movies, Takeshi sees no need for italicizing a joke because he respects his audience's intelligence. At a bar with his new greenhorn partner, he is asked by the female bartender what he does for a living. Answering in his customary expressionless manner, Takeshi says that he sells mail order guns. She looks aghast. An essential part of this scene and in Takeshi's performances in general is his laconic delivery. The lines delivered from an expressionless face--almost a ritual mask--are richly anti-melodramatic gestures that allow the audience to "read into" his performance. While Takeshi has always played roles in this manner, in recent years it has become something of a necessity. A motorcycle accident that caused extensive skull injuries incapacitated muscles in his face as well.

"Fireworks" is closely related thematically to "Violent Cop." Again Takeshi plays a cop who bends rules while being drawn into a confrontation with the yakuza. This time instead of having the burden of caring for a mentally ill sister, he is put in the position of caring for his terminally ill wife. He also provides companionship and moral support to a paraplegic cop, who lost the use of his legs in a shootout in which Takeshi, playing a cop named Nishi, is characteristically out of control. In a bid to pay off debts owed to the yakuza and finance a vacation trip with his dying wife, Nishi stages a daring bank robbery. When the yakuza discover that he is the robber, they send out a crew to steal his money and kill him. At the same time, his fellow cops try to apprehend him. The finale of the film is set in the snowy mountains of northern Japan, where Nishi and his wife are enjoying their final days together. The contrast between their innocent pleasure and the impending showdown with armed men from either camp provides high tension and drama.

"Boiling Point" is the only four of the films that does not feature Takeshi in a starring role. The star is an underachieving youth who works in a garage. The opening scene of the film dramatizes his ineptitude. When it is his turn to bat for a local baseball team, he is in an outhouse taking a crap. He regards his turn at bat as a chore and does not seem to understand the euphoria surrounding the game. Back at the gas station, he gets into a confrontation with a gangster who everybody else has been kowtowing to, in fear of their lives. After breaking the gangster's arm, the youth, named Masaki, is forced to defend his life, which means above all getting his hands on a firearm.

This leads him to Okinawa, which is depicted as a sort of Wild West outlaw state. There he meets Uehara, a repulsive gangster and gun merchant played by Takeshi in a role which dares the audience to hate the popular actor and director. Uehara is a psychopath so compulsively cruel that he has been ostracized by the yakuza itself. Uehara rapes, murders and tortures in such a detached fashion that he might as well be landscaping. But it is Masaki that provides the dramatic focus of the film. Even though Masaki is an unemotional cipher, his underachiever status in a society driven by codes of consensus and politeness, even among the gangsters, serves as perfect satiric counterpoint. It is Takeshi's way of saying that such an outsider has a more authentic existence than the phony world he inhabits.

"Sonatine" is also set in a lawless Okinawa. Takeshi is the head of a yakuza gang that is sent to the island to settle a score with rival gangsters. It is also the most self-consciously "arty" of the four films and, therefore from my perspective, least successful. In one scene, the gangsters romp on the sand in a manner that evokes Richard Lester's work with the Beatles. I prefer the more deadpan style of the other films. The most memorable scenes in the film for me are not the fancy cinematography, but the exchanges between Takeshi and a local girl he has started an affair with. "You must be brave to carry a gun" she says. "No," he replies, in a rare departure from his terse style, "to carry a gun you must be a coward."

A July 9, 1998 Independent profile on Takeshi fills in some useful biographical detail:

"Takeshi, who was born in 1948, had an abusive father, but his hard-working mother helped him to study engineering at Meiji University - only for him to drop out in his fourth year and squander the money on drinking, too ashamed to admit that Honda would not recruit him. He accumulated a gambling debt of pounds 17,000 and ran away from home in 1971, sleeping rough and crashing on friends' floors. It was here that he 'mentored' himself to the stand-up comic Sensaburo Tanu, and a year later was employed as resident comedian at the Franzu-za strip-joint in Tokyo. He went on to form a double act, 'The Two Beats' (the nickname has stuck ever since), and successfully secured a slot with the Japanese TV station NHK in the mid-Seventies. He spent the rest of the decade developing his unique brand of contentious, scathing and scatological humour, which poked fun at politicians and yakuza alike."

There is probably much less to Takeshi's involvement with yakuza gangs than meets the eye. Growing up in a tough neighborhood and working the striptease circuit, Takeshi has many friends in the underworld. He sees himself as a denizen of the underworld too, and has almost nothing but praise for his yakuza buddies during interviews.

Ironically, this stance probably reflects much less of an iconoclast stance than one might expect. In reality, the yakuza are much more tightly integrated into Japanese business and society than organized crime anywhere else in the world. That is, until the collapse of the Soviet Union.

A December 27, 1992 Los Angeles Times article by Alex Gibney explains how the yakuza became so prominent in Japanese society. He says that the yakuza are basically the sinew that keeps Japan's body politic together and that only a breakup of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party could change that.

In 1987, LDP faction leader Noboru Takeshita ran to succeed Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone, who felt his chances were being hurt by a tiny, radical-right group called the Kominto. From loudspeakers on their agit-prop "sound trucks," the Kominto tried to embarrass Takeshita by damning him with mocking praise as a politician "good at making money."

Gibney writes:

"To call off the trucks, Takeshita's chamberlain, LDP kingpin Shin Kanemaru, asked Hiroyasu Watanabe, the president of the Tokyo branch of Sagawa-Kyuin, a trucking firm with mob ties, to approach Ishii. In exchange for an obscure act of penance by Takeshita, Ishii agreed to help and, the next day, the trucks disappeared. In due course, Takeshita became prime minister.

"Ishii, in turn, touched Watanabe for a series of loans and guarantees worth $1.45 billion (U.S.), which Ishii used to buy up a golf course, to invest in the United States and Europe, where yakuza influence is rapidly spreading, and to speculate in the stock market, with the help of brokerage firms Nomura and Nikko, whose executives of also bought $29 million worth of golf-club memberships from Ishii."

The yakuza emerged after the war in cities like Osaka, Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Tokyo as surrogate families for disaffected youths, just like Beat Takeshi. They reinvented themselves as inheritors of an eclectic mix of Japanese traditions -- from highway gambling to the samurai cult of Bushido. They covered themselves with tattoos of mythical stories and gods, while making money in the old-fashioned way: running labor pools and selling black-market goods. From there, they used their financial power and muscle to control the extortion, gambling and prostitution rackets.

The yakuza saw themselves as a kind of underground "businessmen." But even more so than the Mafia of the Godfather novels, the yakuza also saw themselves as a kind of nobility. By offering a place for the excluded underdog in Japanese society, the yakuza's reverence for the traditional Japanese ethic of reciprocal loyalties between the oyabun (boss/father) and the kobun (follower/child) equated the honorable and the corrupt. The oyabun/kobun relationship is at the heart of the ritual of finger-severing: a gruesome rite of atonement in which the kobun presents his fingertip to the oyabun as an act of repentance. Such a rite is central to Takeshi's "Boiling Point," except characteristically the gangster Takeshi forces an underling to yield a surrogate finger.

This dual reverence for capitalism and Japanese martial traditions made the yakuza natural allies for Japan's right-wing and, in the Cold War era, zealously anti-communist Americans. It is to Takeshi's credit that he correctly identifies the yakuza, cops and businessmen as being part of the same deadly web.