Two-Fisted Tales: Kill Me On The Ginza by Earl Norman (Erle Books, 1969 / first published 1961)

Hunting for English language volumes in the dozens of second hand book shops that fill the Jimbocho area (colloquially known as “old book town”) in Tokyo’s Kanda district can be an interesting experience.

At one end of the scale, the area boasts several beautiful, Art Deco shops whose interiors seem to have been carefully preserved since the 1920s. Therein, impeccably-dressed staff wearing disposable white gloves will guide the curious gaijin visitor toward floors housing carefully selected (and ear-wateringly expensive) hardback volumes dealing with specific areas of Asian history, sociology and culture, divided into English, French or German, and seemingly intended to cater to visiting foreign dignitaries who feel the shelves at the embassy are looking a little bare these days.

Needless to say, it was the other end of the scale that was of more immediate interest to your humble correspondent. Down on the street, the English language offerings within the cramped, almost impossibly dusty confines of the smaller, independent shops fall largely into two categories, both priced in such a manner that buying them for fuel or toilet paper would not seem entirely uneconomical, should living conditions in the city take a turn for the worse.

On the one hand, there are masses of largely obsolete, 70s/80s era monographs and text books, many covering such time-specific areas as economics, sociology, engineering and (for some reason) British and Canadian politics. These I take to be either detritus left behind by generations of foreign students and visiting academics passing through Tokyo’s universities, or perhaps reflective of the scholarly interests of the relatively small number of Japanese with both the ability to read English books and the inclination to import them. (Possibly some of the pop economics books could even have originated with bubble-economy era fortune hunters in the ‘80s and ‘90s, or, given the preponderance of hardbacks and the irrelevance of the subject matter, it even occurred to me that some of these books might have entered the country as ballast on ships, or something like that? Who knows.)

And then, on the other hand, we have pulp. Masses and masses of pulp fiction, primarily American, ranging all the way from the ‘50s to the ‘90s.

Although you’ll be lucky to find anything genuinely collectable or valuable in this vein in Kanda (that stuff has presumably already been harvested by dealers by this point), if you duck down the right alleyways you’ll stuff find racks of Carter Browns and Shell Scotts falling apart in the summer sun, together with more Nick Carter: Killmaster’s and other “men’s adventure” series entries than I have ever before seen in one place and a fair smattering of ‘80s/’90s UFO and True Crime titles.

In one inauspicious corner bookshop apparently operated by a pair of elderly ladies meanwhile, I found an entire bookcase filled with nothing but hardcore porn paperbacks. Hundreds of ‘em. (Sadly none of these dated from the smut/sleaze era in which such books had wild n’ zany cover artwork and were quite possibly written by Ed Wood – we’re talking more the blank covers and/or random nudie photos era of the ‘70s. I picked up a couple of the weirder/funnier looking ones, but didn’t fancy having to explain to friends and family my reasoning for cramming ‘Nobody Does It Like Daddy’ or ‘Ski Lodge Orgy’ or whatever in my suitcase, so they’re all still there for the taking, dear readers, if that’s your particular bag. I’d imagine you could probably make enough back on Ebay to cover your plane ticket.)

Of course, the reason all of these books all ended up in Japan is pretty obvious. It lives behind barbed wire in places like Yokosuka and Okinawa, wears khakis and ray-bans, and until recently could be seen cruising the streets in jeeps, probably whilst yelling “yee-ha” and looking for the nearest girls school, if the unflattering caricatures presented in Japanese popular culture are to be believed.

Clearly, the market for pulp fiction (and, no doubt, pornography) amongst U.S. servicemen in Asia in the mid-20th century was vast. So much so that, in the late 1950s, one Norman Thomson, an “old Japan hand [and] well-connected member of the post-World War II American occupation” [source], decided to take advantage of the situation, and began writing a series of low-brow detective novels specifically catering to soldiers stationed in Japan.

Beginning with ‘Kill Me in Tokyo’, six “Earl Norman thrill books” were published by Berkeley in the US between 1958 and 1962, all featuring the ‘Kill Me..’ prefix in the title and recounting the exploits of Norman/Thomson’s series character Burns Bannion, a Tokyo-based Private Eye whose lecherous, bantering first person narration seems modelled fairly closely on that of Richard S. Prather’s Shell Scott.

An easy identification figure for the books’ intended audience, Bannion is a dishonourably discharged U.S. marine who used G.I. bill funds to enrol at a Japanese university, but soon dropped out to set up shop as a PI, making no bones about the fact that his reasons for staying on in Japan are limited to perfecting his mastery of karate and, as he charmingly puts it in ‘Kill Me On The Ginza’, “..anthropological studies, restricted to the female 15 to 40 category”. (Insert your prefered cringe/shudder emoticon here.)

I don’t know how well these books did for Berkeley (suffice to say, they’re fairly scarce on the market these days, going for between $15 and $40 apiece), but whatever the case, Thomson seems to have decided at some point in the sixties that he could cash in more effectively by publishing them himself and selling them direct to oversees servicemen stationed in Asia, a decision perhaps influenced by the escalation of the conflict in Vietnam, which greatly increased the number of US personnel passing through Japan.

As such, cheaply printed new editions of all the books previously published by Berkeley appeared in the late ‘60s, courtesy of the ‘Erle Publishing Corp’ of Minato-Ko, Tokyo. It is at this point that the books, perhaps benefitting from being on the other side of the Pacific from anyone liable to take legal action, adopted the blatant rip-off of the Carter Brown series logo seen on the edition above, whilst the fact that cover prices are given in cents despite the books being printed and published in Tokyo signals pretty clearly that they were never intended for sale outside of American bases and their immediate environs.

Whilst the Berkeley editions of the ‘Kill Me..’ books had pretty lively, comic book style cover art (watch this space for more on that), the Erle reprints feature garish, rather primitive renderings such as the one seen above. God only knows who produced this artwork but, given the expectations created in paperback fans by the ‘Carter Brown’ styled logo, the contrast between this and the immaculate stylings of Robert McGinnis is almost comical.

The Erle editions are printed on the kind of thin, silky paper stock commonly used by Japanese publishers, whilst the prints for many of the pages are lined up in extremely wonky fashion, giving the books a unique, mutant vibe that serves to differentiate them from more professionally produced American or European paperbacks. (The multiple exclamation marks on the back cover copy are a classy touch too.) Financially speaking, they must have done pretty well, as several new Bannion adventures (inviting killings in Yokosuka and Roppongi) were published by Erle alongside the Berkeley reprints.

As regards the actual content of the books meanwhile, aside from the Japanese setting, the only significant differences between Burns Bannion and Shell Scott seem to be that, instead of knuckle sandwiches, Bannion dishes out karate chops to his antagonists, and, no doubt in deference to the demands of his intended audience, Bannion gets his leg over with a far higher number of ‘exotic’ dames than Scott, whose amorous escapades often ended in slapstick disappointment, ever managed to.

To a significant extent in fact, the Norman books I’ve skim-read are as much tame, comically-inclined smut as they are detective stories, with Bannion spending the bulk of his time frequenting hostess bars, night clubs, strip joints, bath houses, massage parlours and pretty much anywhere else where he might conceivably get the opportunity to leer at some women, whilst meanwhile taking full advantage of the feminine attention that a square-jawed, Caucasian stud might reasonable expect to attract in such establishments (in the hetero male fantasy world of a pulp detective novel, at least).

Showing at least a little more imagination in its relentless pursuit of lechery, ‘Kill Me On The Ginza’ finds Bannion at one point pursuing a flighty young lady to the ‘Oppai Jinja’ or ‘Temple of the Breast’, a sacred site allegedly located in the Ogikubo district, wherein expectant mothers are apparently encouraged to stimulate their production of breast milk by making enlarged casts of their breasts from clay and hanging them from the walls.

Hilarity, needless to say, ensues, but fear not – Bannion’s girl is not pregnant (because that would be a bit of a buzz-kill for the G.I. crowd), she’s merely trying to heal the anatomical peculiarities that have helped her make a living through the preceding years. (According to our narrator, “..many G.I.s on leave from Korea have taken photos with their service hats hanging from her knotty protuberances”.) Laugh? Why I nearly… etc.

Elsewhere, the book is thankfully rich in all kinds of other random weirdness, the like of which you’d be unlikely to encounter in even the zaniest of purely American detective novels. The central plotline, if you have the patience to locate it amongst all the leering an shagging, concerns Bannion’s hunt for the killer of a fellow American whose severed head has been found in a duffle bag, a quest that leads him to reluctantly team up with an elderly gentleman who claims to be a master of “ninjutsu”. A lengthy digression outlining the history and practice of this art follows, which must have been eye-opening stuff for Norman’s readers, many years before the ninja first became a regular presence in international pop culture in the late 1970s.

Thereafter, the ninjutsu gentleman hires Bannion to aid him in his investigation of something called the ‘Oshira’ cult – an outlawed group who seemingly practice an unspeakably ancient fetish/fertility rite dating from the very earliest days of Japanese civilisation, in which a sacred wooden pole is wrapped in silk.

Whilst I confess I’m unsure whether the ‘Oppai Jinja’ is a genuine eccentricity of Japanese culture or just something Norman made up for laughs, the whole Oshira business is actually rooted in authentic folklore, and is pretty fascinating, even though Norman, naturally enough, ramps up the sensationalism by assigning the practice of human sacrifice and all-purpose sexual deviance to the cult - which , by the way, turns out to be masterminded by a villain going by the unlikely name of House Charnel, and is operating rather incongruously from a secret meeting place in the urban sprawl of West Ginza.

Other odd, page-filling tangents along the way include discussion of Shinto ‘toilet gods’ and some novel methods for taking finger prints directly from a live human body, but, despite this evidence that the author is at least somewhat engaged with the culture of his adopted home, anyone approaching the Bannion books in the hope that Norman might have taken the opportunity to present his fellow Americans with a sympathetic alternative portrait of life in Japan will be cruelly disappointed.

Indeed, as far as East-meets-West type stuff goes, Bannion’s interactions with the world around him are about as crass as it gets. As the capsule biography of the author I quoted above concisely notes, the books are “..filled with stereotypes and caricatures, and the Japanese women are treated with an outlandish chauvinism, as if the country were one giant geisha house”.

The opening of ‘Kill Me On The Ginza’ very much sets the tone in this regard, as the “oriental doll” Bannion finds himself fooling around with is referred to as “slant-eyed” or variations thereof no less than three times in the space of a single page. It’s… ghastly, to be perfectly honest.

If, as has often been remarked, Japanese pop culture of the 1960s had a tendency to fan the flames of public anger (of both left and right wing varieties) by portraying the American military as a barbaric occupying force engaged almost solely in acts of rape and cultural desecration, it’s safe to say that the fictional antics of Burns Bannion can’t have done much to help matters.

One can easily imagine the kind of controversy that might have resulted had the local media got wind of the content of these books, but perhaps Norman/Thomson was simply confident that the good old language barrier (and perhaps the disinclination of the Japanese establishment to rock the U.S. boat) would save him from adverse publicity.

Speaking of which, worse is yet to come – in terms of the book’s readability more than anything else - as our hero begins to engage in some verbal (as opposed to merely physical) interaction with the populace of the city in which he has apparently lived for many years without getting murdered. (Given the way Bannion behaves, the books’ titles seem more like taunts to random passers-by than anything more dramatic.)

Although Norman sometimes has a decency to record sentences in romanised Japanese, which Bannion then conscientiously translates for his readers (which is both nice, and potentially educational), more often than not the protagonist’s Japanese friends and enemies address him in the kind of pidgin English that would make Charlie Chan blush, whilst he in turn mocks their pronunciation, throwing phrases like “hando baggo” and “iceo boxo” into his bantering narration whilst simultaneously expressing frustration at their failure to grasp the precise meaning of the dense passages of wise-crackin’, tough guy slang he rattles off, irrespective of his listeners’ level of comprehension.

If you can overlook the relentless misogyny and racial insensitivity of Bannion’s banter however (and that’s a pretty big IF, I’ll grant you), ‘Kill Me On The Ginza’ actually holds up as an enjoyably off-beat timewaster. Although Norman lacks the chops of a Prather or Spillane, his prose is certainly never less than lively, and the sheer novelty of the socio-cultural circumstances under which these books were produced makes them – to me, at least – far more interesting reading than the rather smug and interchangeable Shell Scott books.

Both as detritus of an age long gone and as bracing evidence of a variety of inter-cultural exchange that those men in white gloves in the nice bookshops could scarcely imagine, they are actually quite fascinating, and I’ll be sharing a few more scans of other volumes in the series with you over the coming days/weeks.

As a final note, I’ll also draw your attention to the fact that someone has used a biro to etch what seems to be a woman’s phone number onto the back cover of my copy of ‘Kill Me On The Ginza’; perhaps evidence of a previous owner aspiring toward the lifestyle celebrated by the book’s hero, for better or (more likely) for worse.

Nippon Horrors: Ghost Cat of Otama Pond (Yoshihiro Ishikawa, 1960)

Thus far in this ‘Nippon Horrors’ strand, we’ve been looking at movies that are either modern style, Western-influenced horror films, or else just lunatic one-offs of one kind or another, but it is of course impossible to gain an understanding of Japanese horror without examining the more traditional k(w)aidan tales that comprised by far the most prolific category within the genre prior to 1970. And if we’re talking kaidan, then before long, we’ll be talking kaibyo, aka bakeneko, aka GHOST-CATS - a subject that the movie-going public in Japan apparently couldn’t get enough of, with a catalogue of titles stretching right back to the dawn of cinema.

If I started trying to run down the folkloric roots of these ‘ghost-cat’ stories, we’d be here all day, but needless to say, specific ghost-cat legends pertaining to such locales as Okazaki, Arima and (most pertinently in this case, perhaps) Kasane Swamp go back at least a few hundred years, and formed a cornerstone of the canon of supernatural kabuki plays, woodcuts and novels that fed straight into the earliest Japanese fantastic films.

Although most of Japan’s silent-era films are now lost, surviving records indicate that the Okazaki ghost-cat legend alone was filmed three times prior to 1917, once by the esteemed “father of Japanese cinema” Shozo Makino no less, whilst the first example of the ‘cursed wall’ variant, which appears to incorporate elements taken from Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘The Black Cat’ into the mix, appeared as early as 1918.

I have heard Kiyohiko Ushihara’s 1938 production ‘Ghost Cat: Haunted Shamisen’ referred to as the earliest surviving Japanese film to include fantastical elements, and, after the war, the 1950s seem to have heralded an unprecedented boom in ghost-cat pictures, with a few representative examples including ‘Ghost Cat: Cursed Wall’ (Kenji Misumi, 1958), ‘Cat Monster of Ouma Cross’ (Bin Kato, 1954) and ‘Ghost Cat of Yonaki Swamp’ (Katsukiko Tazaka, 1957), as picked from a list comprising many, many more titles.

Given all this, it is slightly ironic that by far the best-known ghost-cat movie in the West is Kaneto Shindô’s arthouse-horror classic ‘Kuroneko’ (‘Black Cat’, 1968), a film that domestic audiences must have seen as a nostalgic summation of a set of clichés endlessly reiterated over the course of the preceding fifty years, rather than the wild novelty it may have appeared to foreign viewers.

So, the Japanese like their ghost-cats – this much we know. Insofar as I can tell from online reading, the plots of these movies seem standardised to the point of complete uniformity, but I probably shouldn’t draw too many generalisations until I’ve at least seen a few more of them. So as such, let’s jump in entirely at random with ‘Ghost Cat of Otama Pond’, selected for no other reason than that I happen to have a copy, and watched it last week.

A relatively late entry in the ghost-cat cycle, this 1960 Shintoho production was the directorial debut of one Yoshihiro Ishikawa, striking out on his own for the first time after a lengthy spell working as assistant and co-writer to horror specialist Nobuo Nakagawa, on such films as ‘Black Cat Mansion’ (1958), ‘The Woman Vampire’ (1959) and ‘The Ghost of Yotsuya’ (1959) (hopefully we’ll get around to those here at some point). Like Nakagawa’s films, ‘..Otama Pond’ seems notable for combining a traditional kaidan storyline with techniques borrowed from contemporary Western horror films, and, unusually for a 1960 genre picture from the cash-strapped Shintoho, it makes great use of colour photography too.*

Things begin in the present day, where we join a neatly-attired couple in western dress who are in the process of getting lost amid a network of narrow, woodland paths in an area we later learn is “known for its thick fog”. They are en route to the man’s parental home, to seek his father’s blessing prior to their marriage, but unknown forces seem to be endlessly drawing them back to the same swampy-looking pond. “If we arrive after dark, my father won’t let us marry”, the man says. A curious notion, but, well.. let’s move on.

Right from the outset here, the atmosphere is incredibly spooky, with massively ominous, droning music (composed by Chumei Watanabe) and authentically muddy-looking, claustrophobic sets used to represent the woodland locale. It is difficult to pin-point quite how the film succeeds so well in creating a genuinely unnerving effect from such stock elements, but nonetheless, it does. Even the thunder-claps seem scary, and when was the last time you felt that whilst watching a horror film?

Of course, frequent cutaway shots to a mewling black cat lurking in the trees help, and when the couple eventually take shelter in a derelict house, despairing of finding their way out of this nightmare before morning, the woman drifts off into a tormented fever after encountering a terrifying vision of a white-haired witch archetype who will need no introduction to those familiar with Kurosawa’s heavily kaidan-inspired ‘Throne of Blood’. (The shot in which the witch appears to ‘reel in’ her fainting victim in slow motion is wonderfully sinister.)

Extensive use is made here of anti-naturalistic, Bava-esque gel lighting, with inexplicable green and red glows lurking around every corner, and indeed, just like the protagonists of a Western gothic horror film, this couple – their clothes and behavior coding them as ‘modern’ and ‘rational’ – seem to have found themselves trapped in a world that is entirely ruled by the more macabre elements of antiquity. (Even the doctor they track down the next morning immediately starts rabbiting on about ancient curses, and chooses to treat the lady’s fever by means of an elaborate Buddhist exorcism.)

Also recalling a Western gothic, it is our characters’ previously obscure family history that eventually proves responsible for subjecting them to such a weird fate… as gradually becomes clear when the doctor begins narrating the story which, via flashback, will comprise the majority of the movie’s remaining run-time.

Back to the days of the Shogunate then, where we find a pretty standard star-crossed lovers vengeance story unfolding, played out in a rigidly formal yet beguilingly beautiful manner. The lovers’ final meeting is a particular highlight in this regard, taking place against a nigh-on apocalyptic sunset in a desolate wasteland, creating a suitably expressionistic backdrop to their doomed farewell.

Interestingly, the in-fighting between the lovers’ rival clans here adds a slight twist of populist politics to the mix – something that seems to be a reoccurring theme within ‘ghost-cat’ stories. Viewers of ‘Kuroneko’ will recall that that film incorporates a pretty strident critique of those who propagate conflict to line their own pockets, and here, the catalyst for the destruction of the benevolent family comes when their patriarch publically speaks out against unfair taxes leveled by the corrupt local magistrate - thus prompting said magistrate and his evil brood of cronies to do away with him and his family in as disproportionately violent and generally dastardly a fashion as can be imagined.

As soon as the good family’s martially gifted son (the male portion of the star-crossed lovers) departs to pursue a career in Edo, the vultures descend, and, as is standard procedure in these supernatural vengeance stories, the family home is set ablaze and the patriarch and elderly grandmother cruelly murdered, whilst the noble daughter/sister chooses to kill herself with a hairpin (that ever-useful accessory of the virtuous Japanese maiden) when kidnapped and threatened with rape by the intruders.**

All of this is already somewhat grimmer business than you’d be liable to see in a Western film from 1960 not entitled ‘Black Sunday’, and, when the noble son returns home to learn of the destruction of his family, he meets his downfall by way of an unusually intense and sinister sword-fighting set-piece, full of bloody wounds, bulging eyes and jagged, kabuki-like choreography.

With ominous, post-massacre shots of blood red skies (echoing both the house-fire and the blood spreading across the waters of the pond where the bodies are dumped), and unspeakably eerie, metal-scraping fiddle music, the combined consequences of all of this villainy amount to strong stuff indeed, designed to have us almost crying out for the ghostly retribution we know is on its way.

And thankfully, it’s not wasting any time getting here, either. Following their crimes, the clan of baddies is almost immediately subjected to such a tirade of hair-raising supernatural phenomena, it’s a wonder they don't immediately go insane and flee straight for the nearest fortified town. Nocturnal visits from reanimated corpses, bleeding walls, ghostly tolling bells, sake turning to blood, giant cat silhouettes and unearthly red glows projected against screen-doors, sleep-walking possessed daughters, gory-lock shaking Macbeth-like phantoms, and even a floating yokai fireball pitching in for the conclusion.

Of course, we all know from the outset that it’s curtains for the villains, but the filmmakers have a heck of a lot of fun getting us to that point, realizing all of the above with a great deal of ghoulish skill and visual imagination, and even managing to generate some surface level tension, despite the fateful inevitability of the scenario now in play.

As seen in ‘Kuroneko’, but perhaps not in earlier versions of this story (or so I would imagine), the vengeful ghost-cat actually takes on solid, humanoid form here too, appearing as a werewolf-clawed half-woman, half-cat monster who turns up in one memorable scene to chomp the head off a passing snake and generally put the wind up the surviving characters even further. Curiously though, this furry cat-monster appears only briefly, and fails to return for the film’s finale, so I can only assume that the filmmakers must have decided that the costume just looked too silly, and minimized its use. It IS pretty silly, to be fair, but speaking as a lifelong fan of outlandish horror movie nonsense, I was still disappointed that we were denied any scenes of full-on, Paul Naschy-esque werecat mayhem. Oh well, you can’t have everything I suppose.

Lacking though at may be in furry-clawed grappling however, the conclusion here is certainly anything but underwhelming – in fact it is an desperate maelstrom of blood-letting, cat-hissing, limb-hacking carnage, incorporating strobe speed cutting, all kinds of goofy spook manifestations and howling super-imposed cat-faces. Whilst it may be far more orderly than the equivalent scenes of madness in Nobuhiko Ôbayashi’s legendary ‘Hausu’ (1977), we’re definitely somewhere in the same ballpark here, tonally speaking.

I many ways, ‘Ghost Cat of Otama Pond’ seems poised at a transitional moment in the development of Japanese horror. From 1960 onwards, the popularity of kaidan films seemed seems to have plummeted (at least if we can judge from the quantity of films produced in the genre), with only Shindô’s more prestige productions really flying the flag for the form by the second half of the decade, leaving Japanese horror flailing around in a bit of a no man’s land, mainly resulting in the kind of occasional one-offs and stylistic cross-overs that we’ve looked at previously in this review strand.

As such, a film like ‘..Otama Pond’ can perhaps best be viewed as an attempt to keep the kaidan train rolling by adopting something of an east-meets-west approach, grafting Western techniques and aesthetics (lightning flashes, gel lighting, hairy monsters) onto a highly traditional, folkloric narrative. The extravagant use of colour is interesting in this regard, with the concentration on deep reds and luminous greens causing ‘..Otama Pond’ to completely lose the trademark ‘bone-chilling cold’ evoked by many older kaidan films, instead moving toward a kind of sweaty, hot-house fecundity that prefigures the kind of colour horror films that would begin to emerge from Italy just a few years later.

Given its era, I was also surprised how thickly the film lays on the horror business. At a time when many Asian (and indeed European) ghost stories were more inclined to go for the ‘softly, softly’ approach, padding out a few minutes-worth of spooky goings on with acres of convoluted plotting and dialogue, Ishikawa really goes all out for scares, throwing everything at his disposal into trying to freak his audience out, and dedicating probably about two thirds of the eventual run time to supernatural creepery of one kind of another. (Needless to say, I approve.)

The stiff presentation of the story here may feel more like a formalised re-enactment of an ancient legend than an engaging piece of human drama, but nonetheless, the extraordinary variety of macabre visuals and the general sense of marauding, out of control terror help make ‘Ghost Cat of Otama Pond’ a hugely rewarding experience for fans of early ‘60s horror, presenting a cocktail of thrills, weird imagery and atmosphere that matches up to the very best of the Italian gothics. By which I mean, I really liked it. A definite two paws up in the cat-related horror movie sweepstakes.

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* Less than a year after this film was released, Shintoho – a studio initially founded by renegade Toho staff following an industrial dispute, and renowned for the creative freedom it allowed its filmmakers – declared bankruptcy and promptly ceased to exist, the earliest casualty of the slow decline of the Japanese studio system through the ‘60s and ‘70s. Notably, the commercial failure of Nakagawa’s ambitious horror epic ‘Jigoku: The Sinners of Hell’ (1960) is often seen as a key factor in the studio’s demise.

** Whilst it is of no importance to the film’s narrative, those of you who, like me, enjoy shouting “NINJA!” at your TV sets at every opportunity may wish to note that the baddies initially creep up on the good family dressed in traditional ninja outfits. So there ya go. NINJA!

Yakuza Cop: The Assassin (Yukio Noda, 1970)

Has the output of a commercial film studio ever matched the sheer level of NO RULES anarchy exhibited by Japan’s Toei studios during the early 1970s? Well, I can’t say for certain, and of course Toei were still producing plenty of relatively ‘normal’ genre pictures to sit alongside their more outré efforts through this period, but nonetheless - the more examples I see of the kind of high-octane, good taste-eviscerating madness that seemed to rule the roost at the studio during these years, the more I’m inclined to think that, for better or worse, there was *something* pretty unique going on behind the scenes.

God only knows what was transpiring on a management level at Toei during this period. If anyone has seen fit to discuss the matter in English, I’m unaware of their efforts, but we can at least speculate some, based on the knowledge that Toei had always been something of an enfant terrible amongst the Japanese film studios, having been established during the period of reconstruction that immediately followed WWII, and bank-rolled largely via the corporate/construction money that accompanied it.

Unashamed b-movie bruisers right from the outset, Toei were free of the sense of dignity and respectability that sometimes dragged down the older studios in the post-war marketplace, and from the mid-‘50s onwards, they locked into a relentless production schedule of action-focused samurai and crime films that allowed them to swiftly gain ground on their more venerable competitors, providing exhibitors with competitive deals on pre-packaged, audience-pleasing double bills that by the dawn of the ‘60s had secured them a position as one of the biggest players in the domestic film industry.(1)

With this kind of underdog, low-brow history, I guess it stands to reason that when cinema attendance began to fall sharply in the ‘70s, and with the remaining audience skewed heavily towards itinerant single men and those too poor to afford TV sets, company policy at Toei would naturally have been to try to push the sex and violence quota of their product several steps further than their competitors, whilst upping the pace of on-screen action as much as possible. And verily, this is exactly what they proceeded to do. AND THEN SOME, as anyone who has seen even the smallest fragment of their post-1968 output will testify.

Which is all well and good, but still, I think it only goes some way toward explaining the sheer madness that seems to characterise much of Toei’s output in this era. Could it be that the films in question were perhaps just the progeny of one or two rogue producers, giving their film-makers a “what the hell, go nuts” blank slate, just to help keep product rolling..? If so, I suppose it figures that when your roster of creatives includes deviants and innovators on the level of Shinyo Ito, Teruo Ishii, Kinji Fukasaku and Norifumi Suzuki - all buoyed up by the knowledge that at least some of their wilder outings turned out to be huge hits – sparks are inevitably going to fly. With this in mind, perhaps the writing was simply on the wall as the studio ploughed on toward the accumulation of what now seems like one of the world’s greatest stockpiles of totally crazed exploitation films.

Beyond all that though, Toei’s daily bread always came from straight-up yakuza films. In fact they pretty much dominated the genre from the ‘60s onwards, releasing vast quantities of formulaic product and setting the agenda for all of the genre’s periodic reinventions. Chris D.’s recently published ‘Gun & Sword: An Encyclopaedia of Japanese Gangster Films, 1955-1980’ (see footnote 1 and then BUY IT) lists details of over 300 Toei yakuza films, and in all likelihood they probably made many more. In fact they made so many of the damn things that the various other genres they dabbled in (pop culture-inclined ‘youth’ flicks and Sukeban/Pinky Violence of course, plus sexploitation, comedy, martial arts, horror, etc.) often seem like mere spin-offs from the endless grind of the yakuza machine.

But just as yakuza material tended to drift across almost by osmosis into other genres, so the pop art surrealism, weird sex and goofball humour seen in the studio’s more unglued productions also sometimes filtered back into the yakuza titles… or at least, I think that’s probably the best way for us to go about making sense of a movie like ‘Yakuza Cop: The Assassin’, whose none-more-generic yakuza title actually masks an all-over-the-map, genre-defying freakout, wantonly mixing elements of Bond-style action/adventure, screwball comedy, crime movie badassery and youth movie energy into a bewilderingly ridiculous, endlessly enjoyable brew that has little to do with any variation on the yakuza formula, but that surely does provide an exemplary demonstration of the kind of craziness Toei were capable of unleashing at the dawn of the ‘70s.

In the aforementioned ‘Gun & Sword’ (I did remind you to buy a copy, right?), Chris D. is actually pretty scathing about the ‘Yakuza Cop’ movies, describing the first entry in the series as “..an eminently forgettable timewaster”, and dismissing this one as being “Not so much directed as slapped together from what looks like nearly unsupervised footage”, concluding that it is “..fun in a very light-hearted, non-discriminating way. Don’t go in expecting high quality and you may be able to enjoy it.”(2)

To which I say: c’mon Chris, really..? I mean, I get where you’re coming from I suppose, and I know you’re primarily about the serious, well-made yakuza films and all that but - *MAY* be able to enjoy it? To be honest, I’d question the sanity of a ‘70s b-movie fan who failed to enjoy this one. I mean, I know from your write-ups on the sukeban films and so on that you’ve got a keen appreciation for mindless mayhem too, so could you really find so little to appreciate in this... this wondrous motion picture, this film in which…. well, I think the best way for us to proceed is with a brief synopsis, don’t you?

So: ‘Yakuza Cop: The Assassin’ opens with the sight of ubiquitous character player Ryôhei Uchida, greasy-haired and cackling in an immaculate white suit, kipper tie and jauntily angled hat, boarding a brightly painted bus belonging to a Hindu dance troupe at an airport carpark. Cutting open the skin of a bongo drum, he finds what he came for – a massive quantity of weed – and the requisite suitcase full of cash changes hands. But wait! Sirens! Apparently a small army of cops are on their way to intercept Uchida! What’s he gonna do?

Well it turns out that what he’s gonna do is run around in a panic for a few minutes, until he is unexpectedly rescued by Sonny Chiba, resplendent in a full-on black leather pimp suit and Meijo Kaji floppy vengeance hat, who screeches to a halt beside him in a bright red dune buggy! “Hop in,” says Chiba, and the requisite enka/funk-fuelled credits sequence plays out against the duo’s tyre-screeching escape from the fuzz, as they leave the cops literally eating their dust.(3)

And what can you possibly say to a movie that begins like that? Not much, beyond a happy combination of “I have no idea why this is happening” and “but please continue, it’s amazing!” that is engendered by only the very best action/exploitation films, and that continues to predominate through the majority of ‘Yakuza Cop’s run time.

When we re-join Chiba and Uchida, they’re busy doing what any of us would do having just staged a daring escape from police custody whilst in possession of a large quantity of illegal drugs: namely, goofing about on a street corner in the same flamboyant outfits they wore during the getaway, exchanging banter with an itinerant fortune-teller and preparing to cement their new friendship by heading to the nearest bar to get drunk. You see, it turns out the pair didn’t actually know each other prior to their escape. But if it occurs to Uchida to wonder exactly WHY Chiba came out of nowhere to stage such an unlikely rescue, well… quick ,move along there, viewer! You’re thinking too hard, when there’s random mayhem to be enjoyed!

Entering the film’s requisite subterranean psychedelic nightspot (‘Club Queen Bee’), complete with a Group Sounds outfit called The Scorpions wailing away on-stage, our heroes are immediately assailed by the sight of a Japanese woman being man-handled by a bunch of neckless, Gomer Pyle lookalike American GIs. Clearly this kind of crap won’t stand, and our guys are just about to go into action when the club’s bouncer intervenes ahead of them. A thoroughly gigantic individual, this turns out to be none other than legendary wrestler Giant Baba, making a brief but memorable cameo appearance.

“You son uva bitch!,” yells one of the Americans, charging forward with a red Gretsch guitar raised above his head(!), before Baba hurls him across the room with such force that he and his buddies are apparently thrown completely out of the movie. With national pride safely reasserted, Chiba and Uchida proceed to pal around with Giant Baba for a few seconds, proclaiming him “the strongest Japanese [they’ve] ever known” and dutifully doing the old ‘bone-crunching handshake’ routine, before he too exits the movie and our heroes move on to the club’s next room, a casino, where some serious yakuza business is going down.

As Uchida is busy introducing Chiba to his gang boss though, disaster strikes in the form of, uh… ninjas!? Well, sort of. Four masked assassins drop from the ceiling wielding pistols and open fire, allowing Chiba the chance to take a hit that conveniently saves the boss’s life, and also to unleash a few licks of the jaw-dropping karate that make him an international star a few years after this film. It’s all to no avail though, as the assailants disappear as quickly as they arrived. Where could they have gone..? Well let’s just say that The Scorpions are piling into their tour van a little bit quicker than might be expected…

And so things go on. If I’ve recounted these opening scenes in exacting detail, it’s simply to give you a feel of the head-spinning velocity that characterises these Toei films – the relentless piling up of incident upon incident, strung together with only the slightest thread of narrative glue, with speed-freak editing and crash zooms barely giving you a chance to catch your breath before the next batch of carnage unfolds. It’s insane, and I love it.

Actually, it’s just as well ‘Yakuza Cop’ takes this kind of non-stop, event-packed approach, because when we do finally get stuck into the central plot-line, it’s pretty dull stuff to be honest. Obviously Chiba is an undercover cop, and obviously he’s busy playing out another variation on the old Yojimbo / Fistful of Dollars formula, ingratiating himself with both sides in a gang conflict and turning them against each other until he’s the last man standing, with only the fraternal bond he develops with Uchida serving to twang his conscience a little along the way.

And so things might have played out if this were a standard Yakuza film, but thankfully director Noda and his collaborators seem keen to do everything in their power to distract us from this fairly hum-drum tale, diverting our attention toward all manner of largely irrelevant shenanigans at every opportunity.

Take for instance the almost surreal romantic interludes wherein Chiba and Uchida visit the latter’s sister, a dewy-eyed young thing who appears to be single-handedly running an orphanage for a generic crowd of happy, cheering children in an idyllic rural setting. (4) A hilariously over-extended sequence shows Chiba and the sister getting to know each other by riding horses through verdant meadows, with so much Vaseline on the lens we can barely see what’s going on. Meanwhile, they leave Uchida in charge of the kids, which scarcely seems a good idea. (One suspects that this whole sub-plot only exists so that Chiba can show off his riding skills and squeeze in his rousing rendition of a romantic ballad, but it’s all pretty funny regardless – weird ‘Sound of Music’ vibes with a ramshackle looking Alpine farmhouse in the background and everything.)

This all provides something of a contrast to the scene later in the movie where Chiba follows a lascivious bar girl / yakuza operative to a wild marijuana party, where we get to see Japan’s leading action hero ‘tripping out’ on the demon weed, complete with all the wild lighting, fish-eyed semi-nudity and fuzz guitar freakout jive you could hope for.




And, making up most of the time when that kinda stuff isn’t happening, we get a veritable avalanche of light-hearted action set pieces that seem peculiarly reminiscent (in tone, if not necessarily in quality of execution) of the kind of stuff Jackie Chan would go on to perfect a decade or two later.

Highlights here are plentiful, taking in blink-and-you’ll-miss it spoofs of everything from Golgo 13 to Thunderball to The Dirty Dozen, a guy who looks like Bunta Sugawara but isn’t putting in a winningly melodramatic turn as a crippled, drunken assassin, and – my personal favourite – frequent appearances by a lead goon who looks like he’s going all-out to win the Japanese Charles Bronson lookalike contest. (I thought this might have just been an accidental happenstance, until Chiba greets him with a line that the subtitles translate for us as “be punctual, you fake Charles Bronson!”)

Frankly, Chiba’s wardrobe alone was enough to keep me entertained through the moments of dull yakuza plotting that punctuate the film’s middle half hour (aside from his aforementioned Sasori outfit, the various-shades-of-green and swirl pattern tie ensemble he’s rocking just prior to the conclusion is astonishingly cool), but thankfully those moments are rare indeed.

I mean, I don’t think I’ve even told you yet about the bit where Chiba chases a crossbow-wielding assassin through an abandoned funfair, complete with randomly placed trampolines and a potentially lethal cups and saucers ride. Or the bit where he gets the ass burned off his trousers after careering around in a burning jeep. Or how about Uchida and his mute sidekick rampaging through a coastal yakuza hideaway in a leopard-skin painted military assault vehicle with a sack full of dynamite..? Man, I was cheering like a football fan at the cup final through that shit. I guess that would have just about done most movies for their action-packed finale, but ‘Yakuza Cop’ carries on to give us random backflipping female kung-fu assassins in black & gold ‘bumblebee’ style outfits, speed boats chases, helicopter stunts, smoke bombs… holy cow, do I ever love this movie.








Well, anyway - you get the idea. Presumably you’re already sold by this point, or have stopped reading. So let’s move on.

One thing that’s notable about ‘Yakuza Cop’ compared to most other Japanese genre films of this period is the complete lack of any nasty sleaze or sexploitation elements. Throughout, the film has an earnestly good-natured, upbeat feel to it to match Chiba’s mugging and Uchida’s slovenly grin. Hell, give or take the marijuana party and the occasional gangster massacre, the movie is practically family friendly – a nigh-on inexplicable occurrence within the context of Toei’s usual MO, but I for one don’t think that makes it any less enjoyable. (Indeed, it’s nice to have one of these kinda films that can be screened in mixed company without the need to issue a warning / apology in advance.)

Such an approach becomes even more surprising though given that we last encountered Yukio Noda on this blog via the singularly vicious Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs, a film that sits at completely the other end of Toei’s tonal spectrum. Insofar as I can tell, Noda remains a fairly undistinguished figure within Japanese b-film lore, a workaday type director with relatively few IMDB credits to his name,(5) but if we can draw any comparison at all between these two examples of his work beside their relentless mayhem, it’s probably an ability to identify the core essence of a film’s appeal (psychopathic abuse in the case of ‘Red Handcuffs’, zany humour in ‘The Assassin’) and to go about as far with it as he possibly can with it before the metaphorical engine splutters to a halt.

And whilst Noda isn’t exactly the smoothest of directors, I can’t help but think that Chris D.’s above-quoted dismissal of his work here as “near unsupervised footage” is a little harsh. Sure, it’s all pretty rough n’ ready, with scenes thrown together seemingly at random, and at least some material apparently shot on the fly with little in the way of finesse or preparation. But that, I think, is very much in keeping with the spirit of a film like this one, in which sheer velocity is valued above all things, and in which any undue application of care, forethought or, heaven forbid, rational thought is liable only to succeed in sabotaging the unstoppable forward momentum.

Plus, amid all the chaos, individual sequences here are often quite well handled, I think. Noda certainly never loses the audience’s attention, that’s for sure, and, in keeping with the majority of Toei product, the cinematography remains accomplished enough to make most low budget American filmmakers weep with envy. The numerous action scenes, though knowingly absurd, are often pretty great too, at times exhibiting some imaginative framing and editing, staggering levels of destruction and above-average stunt-work and fight choreography. (Chiba himself can presumably take responsibility for some of the latter - he was in the process of establishing his famed Japan Action Club at around this time, and many of ‘Yakuza Cop’s action scenes become blatant showcases for his acrobatic prowess… not that there’s anything wrong with that.)

Furthermore, Noda also seems here to be tapping into a vein of self-aware pop art surrealism that to some extent places ‘Yakuza Cop’ within the lineage established by Japanese cult cinema godhead Seijun Suzuki, as presumably filtered through the ‘70s-exploito lens of disciples like Yasuharu Hasebe and Toshiya Fujita. (The police briefing room scenes, where the cops have life-size cut-outs of the criminals they’re tracing propped up against the wall, seem a very Seijun-like touch, for example.)

In fact, at a push you could easily see ‘Yakuza Cop’ forming a perfect bridge between the brash spectacle of those latter-day Nikkatsu youth/action movies and the even more unhinged, comic book stylings of Noda’s more notorious Toei contemporary, Norifumi Suzuki - a man whose formidable Non-Shit Giving this film definitely seems to emulate, if in somewhat less explicit form.

We’ve already noted ’Yakuza Cop’s tendency to lurch momentarily into spoof territory, but I think the legacy of the anarchic post-modernism borne of the aforementioned influences can be seen most prominently in the deliberate ludicrousness of the film’s action scenes. A form of humour that I’ve actually noticed popping up in a wide variety of Japanese films - from Kazuhiko Hasegawa’s Leonard Schrader scripted ‘The Man Who Stole The Sun’ (1979) through to Takashi Miike’s ‘Deadly Outlaw: Rekka’ (2002) - this technique reaches its apex In ’Yakuza Cop’ during the finale, in which we see Chiba in close pursuit of a boat full of heavily-armed yakuza, first in a speed-boat, and subsequently dangling from a rope suspended from a helicopter. Throughout this, our hero appears to dodge the solid wall of machine gun fire aimed at him at near point blank range, only falling when a well-aimed pistol shot cuts through his rope!

Seeking to pre-empt the viewer’s automatic “that’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve seen in my life!” response to such poorly staged or implausible goings-on, the approach used here functions by throwing caution to the wind and simply making the events portrayed on-screen so outrageously stupid that, rather than calling foul, the viewer is instead inspired simply to laugh with the filmmakers in a spirit of happy disbelief - a playful wrong-footing of audience expectation that didn’t become common in Hollywood cinema until… when? Andy Sidaris movies? ‘True Lies’? I dunno.

In conclusion, I don’t want to pump up expectation for this movie too high – god knows, it’s certainly no masterpiece, and it’s certainly not going to change anyone’s life any time soon. But: it is a blast, and sometimes that’s exactly what you need – pure, mindless entertainment, presented with an idiot grin and an energy level akin to a runaway train. A perfect Saturday night party double bill filler, ready mixed to warm up the palette, ready for, say, ‘Stunt Rock’ or ‘Ninja III: The Domination’ or ’Lady Terminator’, or some other truly world class example of mind-boggling action movie nonsense… but with just a touch of cinematic elegance and sly intelligence slipped in there too for an added kick. Perfect.

(1) Prior to this, the convention in the Japanese film industry had been to mix A and B pictures from different studios, so Toei’s ability to provide BOTH halves of the bill at a bargain rate understandably put the rest of the industry into a bit of a spin. Thanks by the way to Chris D.’s utterly invaluable ‘Gun & Sword: An Encyclopaedia of Japanese Gangster Films, 1955-1980’ for all this Toei background.

(2) Pp. 373-374 in the book. There were four films made, of which this was the second. Or at least, I’m pretty sure it is -very similar titles, cast & crew credits and plot synopses of the first two films don’t help much with aiding identification, and discrepancies between the entries in ‘Gun & Sword’, the films’ pages on IMDB and the subtitled credits on the film itself muddy the waters further, but yeah, I’m pretty sure this is the second one, also known as ‘Yakuza Cop: Marijuana Gang’. The third and fourth films by the way were ‘Yakuza Cop: Poison Gas Terror’ and ‘Yakuza Cop: No Epitaphs For Us’ (both 1971), which I mention simply because they have cool names.

(3) I’m assuming it’s Chiba himself singing the theme song incidentally, as is standard practice for Japanese popular movies, and a right, throaty, gravelly job he makes of it too.

(4) I’m afraid I can’t match up the IMDB cast list well enough with character names stated in the film to really be sure who plays who in the supporting cast, so I thought I thought it best just to leave out acting credits from the majority of this review, rather than randomly guessing. So apologies to the woman who played the sister, and to Fake Charles Bronson for that matter. 

(5) Noda went on to direct several other Chiba vehicles later in the ‘70s, and it’s strange to note that several of the cinematic in-jokes seen in ‘Yakuza Cop’ seem to act as odd ‘future echoes’ of moments in his subsequent career; the brief spoof of Golgo 13 prefigures his directorship of a live action version of that franchise in 1977, whilst the appearance of Japanese Charles Bronson seems to anticipate the utterly bizarre sounding US/Japanese kung fu flick ‘Bronson Lee’, which he helmed in 1975. Coincidence..? To avoid the distraction of further thought on the issue, I’m going to go with “yes”.