Emerging from the rubble of two war-ending weapons of mass destruction as well as its own barbarism, Japan was reduced to its knees. With a cascade of constitutional changes at the hands of their occupiers, as well as the liberation of so-called “Sangokujin” (Taiwanese, Koreans, and Chinese) whom Japan had spent the century systematically oppressing and obliterating, the people looked on in punishment as their country underwent rapid reformation once again. It is against this backdrop Rikio Ishikawa (a soul-destroyingly evil performance from Tetsuya Watari), the son of a country humiliated beyond defeat, the product of the pillaging of a national identity, violently defies salvation as a modern-day Ryunosuke Tsukue in Kinji Fukasaku's most abyssal picture of his ferociously graphic career; enter the “Graveyard of Honour”.
Following Ishikawa's tumultuous descent into oblivion over the span of the Japanese Occupation, “Graveyard of Honour “endeavours to plunder the lowest depths of immorality, deliberately finding itself at odds with more than just the viewer's stomach contents. After assaulting members of a rival gang and carrying out a robbery against a Sangokujin gambling den, Ishikawa stumbles from one heinous act of debauchery to the next; from raping the geisha who stashed his gun away from him blowing up his godfather's car (after jeopardizing his electoral victory), he eventually finds himself banished from Tokyo altogether. In Osaka, he plummets further from societal fringes headfirst into dope addiction, escalating the ignominousity of his actions until the film's body-shattering conclusion.
One of four films Fukasaku would release in 1975 (including the violently enthralling Blue Ribbon Award-winning Cops vs Thugs), this anarchic negation of humanity makes for a nauseating experience with zero rest bite from its insalubrious carnage. Much like Abel Fererra's Bad Lieutenant would expunge with as much sadistic glee some seventeen years later, Fukasaku does away with narrative pleasantries for the sake of deplorability as ambiguous as Ishikawa's shades, exploiting the totality of his reprehensible contempt for civility to the extreme. And yet, for all its nihilistic violence, Graveyard of Honour makes for a viciously executed foray into the underbelly deeper than even Fukasaku tended to tread: upping the ante from the likes of Battles Without Honour and Humanity with its dizzying editing, character bombardment, and documentarian aesthetic (not to mention a fervent rotation of tonal palettes), this grizzly take on Goro Fujita's novel is a monument to the ugliness of atrocity, of a past rightfully disowned, of a nation's paradoxical struggle to reclaim itself.
