Have you ever heard the word “YAKUZA”? This typical Japanese jargon means a Japanese organized crime syndicate similar to Mafia. Japanese film history once flourished by this Yakuza movies. The representative series were created by TOEI（東映）. However, the film industry has been downsized in these several decades, and now, you could hardly find a very quality yakuza movie which can be seen by foreigners these years. Instead of making such once-popular type of movies, they are keep creating love romance teen movies targeted for teenagers in Japan. It even seems like a kind of gentrification in a Japanese movie industries to me. They seems to be forced to make such movies instead of making very serious, quality movies with great actors.
So, is there no such great Yakuza movies in Japan like extinct Japanese wolves? The director of this movie Mr. Shiraish then answers “No” by this film. This movie is literally “lone wolf” in today’s Japanese film industry. I can assure that this film has a very good quality and I can recommend this film to foreigners with 100% confidence. This is a kind of revenge to the great HongKong noir, or Korean Film Noir films which originally inspired by Japanese old Yakuza films but now famously known as gang noir films.
Of course, there are many serious violence in this movies, but still I think it is really worthy to watch this film because the essential story has such a strong impact and makes you really think deep. What is the true good and evil? The set is in Hiroshima known as a place of first atomic bombing. These factors also make the story much deeper than any other films in Japan. This kind of movie is thought to be very domestic film, but if you have a chance to watch in English someday, I really recommend to watch both series 1 and 2.
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