Shinjuku Triad Society
(Shinjuku kuroshakai: Chaina mafia sensô, 1995)
Miike Takashi
Japan
100 min, color, Japanese / Chinese (English subtitles)
Review © 2004 Branislav L. Slantchev
This is the first entry in the Black Society Trilogy (the other two being Rainy Dog and Ley Lines) by the prolific Miike Takashi. The films are not related narratively and do not share protagonists (except Taguchi Tomorowo who appears in vaguely similar roles), so their grouping together reflects their thematic content and stylistic approach more than anything else. They are films set in the lowest societal milieu: the outcasts from the outcasts. Every society has a seedy side it would rather not acknowledge, but that somehow impinges on the normal lives of its members. The West has its mafia, China has its triads, and Japan has its yakuza. Every society also has an even darker side that it would rather pretend does not exist. Even below the criminal world lies the hopeless, brutal, and seemingly devoid realm of the untouchables, the ones who fill the jobs we'd rather not think about, the ones we ignore, the ones that rarely, if ever, make the back page of a local newspaper. The West has its migrant workers, and Japan has its people of Chinese descent.
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| In the backroom of a seedy world | Shiina Kippei, the Taiwanese Japanese |
Miike is not going to make many fans by training his camera unflinchingly and shining the projector lights in this abyss. What may make him a darling of the international film festival circuit is not likely to make him especially popular in his own country. Nobody likes people who make it their business to show us the ugliness of our existence, and the way our beautiful lives sometimes depend on the rather less humane lives of others. Miike, however, does not offer some misguided social critique that would produce a momentum for change. Instead, he prefers to be the invisible observer who gazes upon such lives to discover that they have not lost their humanity. Our passions, loves, and urges all make their appearance, albeit in exaggerated, grotesque forms that may be barely recognizable sometimes, and yet that seem oddly familiar and comprehensible as expressions of humanity.
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| Conventional full body cavity search | Unconventional police interrogation |
The first entry in the trilogy is a story of love, of passion, of filial duty, and of sacrifice. It may not often look that way under the barrage of visuals that would make even a seasoned fan of the genre cringe. It may often be lost amid Miike's misogyny, that is all too manifest in this film. But it's there nonetheless, with emotions percolating to the cinematic surface before exploding in a total visual assault. It is a rare film whose nominally good protagonist shares more with the nominally bad one than with "normal" good human beings. It is an even rarer film that succeeds in making the audience sympathize with both.
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| The boyz in da hood | Tatsuhito's family is ignorant |
Tatsuhito (Shiina Kippei) is a cop, born in Taiwan to a Japanese father and a Chinese mother. This may mean nothing to us as Westerners, but it seems that the Japanese are especially sensitive to this sort of mixing, perhaps because it reminds them of World War II, or perhaps because it hints at the demographic dangers that will result if this practice becomes more common. At any rate, the Chinese in Japan are neither quite Chinese (for they have grown up in a different culture) nor quite Japanese (for they are not readily accepted by society). Tatsuhito spends his time proving his "Japaneseness" by being more Catholic than the Pope: he hunts down Chinese gangsters, even using Japanese yakuza as expedient allies. He wants to wipe out his ancestral blot by violently severing all possible emotional links, as if being ardently Japanese and over-zealously anti-Chinese would somehow change his heritage.
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| Love Chinese-immigrant style | Ritsuko's coke-and-sex trips |
His crusade against the Chinese (who live mostly in squalor in the notoriously crime and poverty ridden Shinjuku district) pits him against Wang (Taguchi Tomorowo), an eccentric ex-pat, also from Taiwan, who seems bent on taking over the organ trafficking and prostitution rackets from the Yamame gang, making its leader (Osugi Ren) quite unhappy in the process. As Tatsuhito bears down on Wang, he discovers that his own younger brother Yoshihito (Izutsu Kyosuke), supposedly studying to become a lawyer, is more than involved with Wang. Suddenly Tatsuhito is forced to confront the futility of his own quest by having to choose between saving his brother from the ruinous path of crime and persevering in his eradication crusade, and sacrificing his brother.
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| Taguchi Tomorowo, the other Taiwanese | Unconventional police interrogation |
Brotherly love and filial duty are not the only loves in this film. The love story between Wang and his boy lover (who opens the film as the narrator) forms the unlikely background to the violent action. Simultaneously brutal and tender, this love is painfully real, even if both have trouble behaving in ways one would expect lovers to. When the adolescent boy blows other men in toilets and bars for money and small gifts, he does not appear to bother Wang. It is only after he sucks the dick of a rival Japanese yakuza that Wang goes postal on him, and one cannot help that jealousy is not exactly the feeling that drives him to savage his lover. Wang himself is one odd mother: from the exhibitionist touch (a character played by Tomorowo in Full Metal Yakuza would also expose himself similarly), to his constant drinking of bottled water (and sometimes washing his hands in it), to his guilty conscience over the murder of his father, and finally to his readiness to brutalize with no apparent compunction, all combine to make Wang an enigmatic and not altogether hateful character.
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| Not your grandmother's compote | Abbey Road |
In this, he is quite similar to Tatsuhito, the hunter and the prey are interchangeable. They have kept their humanity, but it is well concealed beneath a rather impenetrable shield of violence. Even their love stories are oddly parallel. Tatsuhito severely mauls the prostitute Ritsuko (Yanagi Airi) during interrogation and later returns to rape her anally while looking for information on Wang. Not quite the Cop of the Year candidate. Astonishingly (or perhaps not, after all, this is a Miike film), the rape makes Ritsuko and instant fan, and she falls in love with Tatsuhito because he's the only one who has ever made her come without getting high on coke first. Romeo and Juliet this ain't, but it does form an analogue to Wang's love-violence relationship, whose homosexuality is mirrored in Tatsuhito's anal penetration of Ritsuko (even if he does give a slightly different reason for it).
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| Hi, I have come to question and rape you | Nose-crossed lover |
In the end, Shinjuku Triad Society emerges as a disturbing portrait of the dregs of society, men and women who live in the margins of our existence, but whose shadowy emotions are no less real than ours. They may be distorted, they may be extreme, but they are still human. Miike plunges us into a world of such extremes that one may forget he is dealing with human beings. A hyperbolic assault on the senses designed to jolt the viewer into recognition, the film comments more on the audience than it does on its subjects. Although not nearly as outlandishly edited as some of Miike's later films, this one is a good introduction to his work.
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| The "good" lovers... | ...and the "bad" lovers |
I do have to warn potential viewers that violence is nearly constant, the above raping scenes being the tamest of the offerings. If you cannot stomach eyeball gouging, more rape (homosexual this time), throat slitting, point blank shootings, and other assorted (and very bloody) mayhem, then perhaps a more conventional rendering of a love story is in order. If, on the other hand, you are prepared to accept artistic license to exaggerate, then Miike's film will prove satisfying.
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| All in a day's work | Romeo and Julio |
The Artsmagic DVD is excellent. Available separately and as part of the special edition Black Society Trilogy, it offers an anamorphic widescreen transfer (as good as it will ever get), superb English optional subtitles, and a cornucopia of extras: a feature-length commentary by the knowledgeable Tom Mes, trailers, filmographies of the cast, along with special interviews with Miike and his editor. Most recommended.
August 25, 2004