As Japan gears up for the 1964 Olympic games, the cops start to crack down on the gangs, under pressure from the public and the press, adding a new dimension in the war for power among the yakuza families of Hiroshima.
While The Godfather romanticized the American Mafia in the early 1970s, Kinji Fukasaku's five-film series known as The Yakuza Papers: Battles Without Honor & Humanity revolutionized the Japanese yakuza film with unprecedented intensity. A post-World War II epic that broke Japanese box-office records, this complex, utterly authentic cycle of gangster films replaced the popular ninkyo or "chivalry" films of the '60s with jitsuroku, an entirely new breed of gangster film that rose from the ashes of Hiroshima and post-war reconstruction, depicting a meticulously detailed "alternate history" that had been ignored by the "official" factual record.
