Young director Yoshimura Kōzaburō could hardly believe his good fortune when Shōchiku, one of Japan's ‘Big Four’ motion picture studios, offered to let him make his feature film directorial debut with the adaptation of Kishida Kunio's best-selling novel, Warm Current (Danryū, 1939). But there was one condition: Yoshimura could make this romantic melodrama only if he promised that his next film would be The Legend of Tank Commander Nishizumi (Nishizumi Senshachō Den, 1940), the story of an ordinary conscripted soldier from rural Kumamoto in Kyushu, Nishizumi Kojirō (1914–1938), who had recently been killed in battle in China (Jackson 2019, 4–5). Yoshimura kept his end of the bargain and made The Legend of Tank Commander Nishizumi in 1940 with superstar Uehara Ken in the title role (Yoshimura 1976, 61–3). The cinematic apparatus was deployed to construct a hero for specific imperialist purposes (Iida et al. 1940, 55–6).

Thirty-five years later, Fukasaku Kinji brought another real-life figure to the screen for a completely contrary agenda. Graveyard of Honor (Jingi no hakaba, 1975), based on the non-fiction novel of the same name by Fujita Gorō, tells the true story of Ishikawa Rikio (Watari Tatsuya), a self-made yakuza whose excesses included unsanctioned crime sprees, heroin addiction, murder and, eventually, suicide in prison. Fukasaku's narrative closely related Ishikawa's rise to the desperation of early post-war Japan. Although Ishikawa Rikio is considered an anomaly in Fukasaku's film, the ability of that anarchic, self-destructive subject to attain a powerful status within organised crime is intimately related to the aftermath of the Second World War. Both Ishikawa's sociopathy and its shocking success are indices of the physical and psychological devastation in which Ishikawa operates: the mass poverty and starvation immediately after the war; the cynicism of the police; the betrayal of a humanised emperor; and the contradictions of the compulsory democracy imposed by the US occupation that in itself had begun to sympathise with the right-wing politics of its war criminals.

Just after the turn of the twenty-first century, another iconoclastic Japanese filmmaker, Miike Takashi, attempted a thought experiment with New Graveyard of Honor (Shin jingi no hakaba, 2002), his tellingly titled remake of Fukasaku's film: what if there were an Ishikawa born a couple generations later, whose career began to peak at the end of the 1980s before careening into mayhem along with the post-bubble economy?