Police detective Seiji Otaki (Ken Ogata) works at (fictitious) Imamiya Police Station in Naniwa Ward. He’s not exactly popular with the officers there, to put it lightly. Nor with the Osaka Police in general. They strictly follow their rules. Otaki however has his own ways to solve his cases, cutting corners whenever he can, always making sure he gets the most out of every situation for himself.
He rarely follows protocol, acting on his own instincts. Gathering information at places no fellow officer would even consider. Highly sensitive information… that he would then share with the press for a meal and a night of drinks.
Otaki is the live-in boyfriend of Keiko (Ayumi Ishida), the former girlfriend of drug addict and meth dealer Sakagami (Shigeru Izumiya). It was Otaki who put Sakagami in prison. Now, he enjoys the good times on the futon with Keiko. Her son Minoru (Kunitaka Kawakami) however never accepts Otaki as the new father in the house.
A young woman was raped and murdered in a rainy night in the Kizu River wastelands close to the Tsumori Apartment Complex in Nishinari Ward where she lived. Police are reluctant to get Otaki involved but because he was the first at the scene, they have no choice.
Otaki works following his instincts and soon finds out more about the murder victim than even her own parents knew. The morning papers tell them what they never expected. They are not amused – and neither are Otaki’s superiors.
At the same time, Sakagami, Keiko’s drug-addled ex-boyfriend is released from prison. He asks Keiko to move back into her place. Otaki thinks he can handle the situation.
Otaki arrests a suspect in the murder case on unrelated charges, a painter selling his pictures in Kamagasaki. He is sure he got the right guy but because he went against the rules here again, he his dismissed from the case.
Sakagami is seriously messed up. Minoru, Keiko’s about 13-year old son, however quickly sides with him. Sakagami soon gets back into his meth dealing business, employing Minoru to take drugs across the city.
Otaki soon finds out about all this but it takes Sakagami turning crazily violent towards Keiko and eventually the whole neighborhood to get him re-arrested.
Meanwhile, Otaki gets absolutely hooked on solving the murder case. A decoy would trap the murderer, he assumes… a lonely woman in a rainy night walking a remote stretch along the Kizu River. He asks Keiko to be that decoy. Things do not go as planned.
Final image: Otaki in a rainy night holding dying Keiko in his arms. That was the image that went on the posters.
A multi-layered existential masterpiece, rough, dirty, delving deep into the human condition at large and the grime of Osaka’s rougher areas in particular.
Table of Contents
Yaju-deka (Japan, 1982) 野獣刑事
Not so quick. When Toei Studio boss Shigeru Okada saw a rough cut of the film, he decided that so far, that’s not a true Toei film. Okada wanted more action.
So, shooting continued. Otaki lives with Minoru, they get along well after all. But then Sakagami is released from prison again. Sakagami kidnaps Minoru and takes him on a wild car chase all the way from Umeda to Sakai City in the south of Osaka, shooting several people on the way.
Now, those are the action scenes the Toei boss wanted. Partly shot guerilla style because everyone involved knew that shooting permits for a high-speed car chase on busy streets in Umeda would never be granted.
Sakagami (with Minoru in tow) eventually holes up in a residential building on top of a hill in Sakai City. His gun is loaded, he’s out of his mind.
The police realize that there is only one way to deal with the situation in order to both neutralize Sakagami and rescue Minoru. They need to send Otaki in…
The Title
Yaju-deka, translating to Beast Detective was the film’s working title. Nobody expected that title to be the final release title – that title was too outrageous even by Toei standards. Still in the end, that title stuck.
Internationally, the film was released as The Dropout. A title that makes little sense as there is no dropout in the film. Otaki is certainly not a dropout – he built his career as police detective as a renegade force. Some of the younger officers admire (and fear) him for exactly that reason.
So, Beast Detective should have been the international release title … but when those international studio suits make their release decisions, they rarely care about the film in question. They rather listen to market research and their estimated profit margins.
Script and Location Hunting
Yaju-deka does not just look like a film telling a story from the margins of 1982 Osaka. You can almost smell the city in this film. At every angle, dirty old Osaka is present. Down to the tiniest details, this film is not just about Osaka, it truly feels like Osaka.
That’s because both screen writer Fumio Konami and producer Tatsuo Honda and later on also director Eiichi Kudo and his staff toured Osaka extensively.
Kudo spent three months in Osaka location scouting prior to shooting, criss-crossing the city on foot and public transport.
That’s when he and his staff came across an appropriately shabby empty house in Juzo, right at the Kanzaki River. They rented the house and it became Keiko’s apartment – one of the central locations in the movie.
At one point during shooting, a large fire engulfed a chemical factory right across the Kanzaki River. Kudo immediately filmed it from the apartment window, along with the fire engines arriving. It’s that fire that triggers meth-head Sakagami’s violent outburst, attacking Keiko and then the whole neighborhood.
The film’s budget would never have covered staging a fire like that – but since the fire happened anyway, Kudo quickly integrated it into the script.
The original script called for many scenes to be shot in the homeless area of Kamagasaki. In the final film, there are some Kamagasaki scenes but only very few. The homeless population of the area proved less than welcoming towards the studio production with all their equipment vans.
The Director: Eiichi Kudo
Director Eiichi Kudo (1929 – 2000) was born and grew up in Hokkaido. He graduated from the Faculty of Law at Keio University in Tokyo in 1952 and then entered Toei Studio for an office job in the Planning Department in their Tokyo headquarters.
In 1954, Kudo was transferred to Toei’s Kyoto Studio and became an assistant director. In 1959, he directed his first film, Fukaku hicho.
This being the Golden Era of samurai movies, Kudo went on to direct numerous period pieces for the studio. One of his most well-known films, 13 Assassins (1963) dates from that time.
Once the market for samurai films dried up at the end of the 1960s, Kudo followed Toei’s switch to realistic-looking yakuza movies.
After a time directing TV period dramas in the 1970s, Kudo returned to Toei and did there his perhaps best work: Aftermath of Battles Without Honor and Humanity (1979), a “special entry” into the Battles Without Honor and Humanity yakuza war franchise as well as Yokohama BJ Blues (1981), a film on a blues singer who doubles as a private detective.
The stand-out film of his career however remains Yaju-deka – Beast Detective.
Actor Ken Ogata
Ken Ogata (1937 – 2008), playing detective Seiji Otaki, started out in a Tokyo theater group before heading for the movies.
The first real movie role he got, like so many actors of this generation, in a pink movie. In The Sex Check (1968), he plays a failed sports sprinter who gets to train a young female athlete for the Mexico Olympics in 1968. She does have to pass the obligatory “sex check” however and that proves difficult.
Ken Ogata’s career finally took off when he became the main actor in the NHK TV period drama Hissatsu shikakenin, appearing in the starring role for 31 episodes in 1972 – 73.
From then on, he was a much-in-demand actor both on the small and the big screen.
On the big screen, in cinema, his perhaps most famous films are the crime drama Vengeance is Mine (1979) and the Edo Era set rebel picture Eijanaika (1981), both directed by master filmmaker Shohei Imamura.
Kudo also played woodprint artist Katsushika Hokusai in Kaneto Shindo’s Edo Porn (1981), alongside Yuko Tanaka who plays his daughter.
Yaju-deka provided him however with a once-in-a-lifetime role as the Beast Detective.
A stand-out role in his later career, Ken Ogata acted in Peter Greenaway’s 1996 idiosyncratic movie adaptation of Sei Shonagon’s The Pillow Book. Sei Shonagon was a Heian court lady living from about 966 to 1025 A.D. whose observations and thoughts on Heian court society are one of the classics of Japanese literature. Greenaway’s movie, also titled The Pillow Book largely translates Sei Shonagon’s ancient notes into modern times. Ken Ogata plays Sei Shonagon’s father in the movie, a father who would deck out his daughter in loving full-body calligraphy. Nude full-body calligraphy being one of the major topics in Greenaway’s movie.
Actor Shigeru Izumiya
Shigeru Izumiya (born in 1948) plays drug addled meth dealer Sakagami in Yaju-deka.
Izumiya, born in Aomori but raised in Tokyo, started out in the early 1970s as a folk singer. His rough, rebellious songs became major soundtracks for Japan’s rebellious 1970s youth. By the end of the decade however, Izumiya’s singing career faded.
Izumiya went to work in the movies. He appeared in Aftermath of Battles Without Honor and Humanity (1979), directed by Eiichi Kudo, he had a major role in Sogo Ishii’s dystopian punk pic Burst City (1982), he appeared as tattoo artist in the Osaka movie Tattoo Ari (1982).
In 1986, Izumiya directed the experimental short film Death Powder, today considered to be the movie that started the genre of Japanese Cyberpunk. Films like Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989), the perhaps internationally most famous of all Japanese Cyberpunk movies would most likely never have been made without Izumiya providing the ground work on Cyberpunk aesthetics with Death Powder.
The Internet Movie Data base (IMDb) lists 156 movies and TV dramas with Izumiya as an actor, usually playing an outsider or misfit of some sort.
Izumiya is still active today in many capacities: as actor both in movies and on TV, as participant in TV variety shows. For a time, he ran his own TV cooking show Kitchen Live.
On the other hand, Izumiya is still playing music. Singing rough rock ballads, sometimes he even gets invited to the prestigious Kohaku Uta Gassen NHK TV New Year’s Eve show.
Actress Ayumi Ishida
Singer and actress Ayumi Ishida (1948 – 2025) plays the part of Keiko in Yaju-deka, the ex-girlfriend of Sakagami, girlfriend of Otaki and mother of Minoru.
Ishida started out as singer and went straight to the top. Her song Blue Light Yokohama topped the charts in 1968 / 1969 and brought her the first invitation to the Kohaku Uta Gassen show, the first of 10 appearances on the show over the following years.
In the early 1970s, Ishida branched out into movie acting, her first film being the disaster flick Submersion of Japan (1973). Her later films include the Osaka yakuza picture Yasha (1985) where she plays the wife of ex-yakuza turned fisherman Shuji (Ken Takakura), the main character of the film.
Ishida also appeared in the Osaka movie The Homeless Student (2008).
Osaka Locations
Yaju-deka clearly focusses on the rough and dirty areas of Osaka, centering on Nishinari Ward as the site of the initial murder, neighboring Naniwa Ward as location of the (fictitious) Imamiya Police Station and Kamagasaki as the area where the murder suspect sells his paintings.
Keiko’s apartment appears to be in walking distance from Nishinari / Naniwa in the story told. In fact, the house was located in Juzo, quite a subway ride away from Nishinari in far northern Osaka.
Sakagami’s car chase at the end of the film runs from Umeda in the north to Sakai City in the far south of Osaka. During the chase, police dispatches clearly point out the locations where things are taking place.
