Speaker: Mark Schilling, author of Contemporary Japanese Film, ... Mark had this to say about himself and his connection with yakuza flicks. "When I came to Japan in 1975, I was already a fan of Japanese films, but totally ignorant about yakuza (Japanese gangsters), save for Mifune Toshiro's tubercular hood in Kurosawa's The Drunk- I obtained another view in 1990 when I started writing a nightlife column for The Japan Times Weekly. I profiled not only the nightclub scene, but also various nightlife types: an Israeli street peddler one week, a Chinese hooker the next. My biggest "get" was the self-proclaimed "godfather of Roppongi," who had lived in the States, spoke fluent English, and boasted about having been interviewed by Diane Sawyer for the weekly television show 60 Minutes. The columns were later collected into the book Tokyo After Dark (Japan Times, 1992), which is now out of print. I started writing film reviews for The Japan Times in 1989, at a time when the traditional gang films were becoming an endangered species. In the early 1990s, however, straight-to-video or "original video" (OV) films became popular with video shop renters -- and many featured yakuza. When OVs began getting brief theatrical releases in the mid-1990s I checked them out -- and realized that directors like Miike Takashi and Mochizuki Rokuro were creating a new type of a gang film that reflected social realities (Mochizuki's Another Lonely Hitman) or the director's unfettered imagination (Miike's Fudoh), not standard genre tropes. Though not an OV director, Kitano Takeshi was, though films like Boiling Point and Sonatine, also developing his own, utterly individual take on the genre . Meanwhile, the films about gang good versus evil that Toei had made so popular in the 1960s were, lacking new stars and ideas, nearing extinction. In 1996 I wrote about this phenomenon for The Japan Quarterly and, in a longer version, for The Encyclopedia of Japanese Pop Culture (Weatherhill, 1997). By this time, I had become seriously interested yakuza movies - and was seeing more films from the genre's Golden Age in the 1960s and 1970s from directors such as Ishii Teruo, Kato Tai, Makino Masahiro, Yamashita Kosaku, Fukasaku Kinji and the great, unclassifiable Suzuki Seijun. I also realized that, save for Suzuki and his 1960s masterpieces (Generation of Tattoos, Tokyo Drifter), critics in the West had paid little attention to the genre and its creators. That began to change with Rotterdam Film Festival's 1999 screenings of films by Fukasaku, Miike, and Mochizuki that created a new generation of Western fans such as Tom Mes, who later launched the influential Midnight Eye website. By 2001 it was obvious to me that there was now a readership for an introductory book on the genre - an idea I pitched to Peter Goodman, the publisher of Stone Bridge Press. After nearly a year of back and forth, he finally gave me the green light and I began to research and write what would become The Yakuza Movie Book: A Guide to Japanese Gangster Films (Stone Bridge Press, 2003). When The Yakuza Movie Book was published in December of 2003, it was the first of its kind. Now there are not only other foreign books and websites in the West devoted to the genre, but also a steady stream of subtitled DVD releases of yakuza movies from the Golden Age on." Your ticket for admission to Mark Schilling's presentation "In re: Yakuza Flicks" will be a signed copy of The Yakuza Movie Book: A Guide to Japanese Gangster Films. Signed paperback copies of The Yakuza Movie Book may be purchased at Good Day Books for three thousand one hundred forty five yen (¥3145) each, tax included. |
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