Excavating the Zainichi Yakuza Film

Abstract

In contrast to the explicit Zainichi subjecthood discussed in the previous chapter, the studio gangster films in this chapter portray characters who are ambiguously ethnic. The films are dependent on an active and desiring spectatorship and criticism to claim them and render them legible as Zainichi images. This spectatorship focuses on the moments of melodramatic excess within the film where ethnicity can be made legible, at times ‘against the grain’. I explore how Zainichi Korean film criticism of Tōei’s line of ‘True Accounts’ yakuza films in the 1970s prompted screenwriter Kasahara Kazuo to include explicitly Zainichi characters in the scripts he wrote for Fukasaku Kinji. I examine this active spectatorship, both at the time the movies were released in the early 1970s, and in the time frame of the retrospective programming of these films in Zainichi Korean film festivals in the 1990s and 2000s. I focus in particular on Kansai Murder Squad [Nippon bōryoku rettō: keihanshin koroshi no gundan] (Yamashita Kōsaku, 1975) and the text of its star, Kobayashi Akira.