Kishiwada City, located in the southern-most reaches of Osaka-fu, the Osaka administrative region, might very well be an almost unknown territory to residents of Osaka proper. Yes, in the far south, there is Sakai… but beyond that? Well beyond that, there is Kishiwada. Stretching from the sea to the mountains, bordering Wakayama Prefecture.
Kishiwada City is famous for one event… the annual Danjiri Float Festival. A very large and, by many accounts, rather rowdy street festival.
Then, in the early 1990s, a guy named Riichi Nakaba came along and suddenly put the city on the map of renegade Japanese youth culture.
In 1994, Kishiwada Shonen Gurentai (Kishiwada Youth Gang), Nakaba’s account of his own violent life as a youth in gang-riddled Kishiwada was published and received immediate national attention.
Could it be true? Such a violent life in such a violent city… just off of Osaka, Osaka itself largely being considered Japan’s crime-ridden city by many people living elsewhere in the country.
In Nakaba’s book, the life of high school students in Kishiwada sounded like a violent nightmare.
The movies were quick. In 1996, Nakaba’s novel was turned into a movie, Kishiwada Shonen Gurentai (internationally released as Boys, Be Ambitious), directed by Kazuyuki Izutsu, the screenplay written by zainichi Korean writer Chong Wui-sin, who later wrote the screenplay for the infamously violent Takeshi Kitano Osaka movie Blood and Bones (2004).
Takashi Miike, one of Japan’s most controversial movie directors at the time, was offered to direct the sequel to Boys, Be Ambitious, based on Nakaba’s second novel where he describes the struggles of the little gang of high school students when entering the adult world after graduating.
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Young Thugs: Innocent Blood (Japan, 1997) 岸和田少年愚連隊 血煙り純情篇
Independent-minded Miike generally didn’t do any sequels to any other director’s movie. He made an exception here. Reportedly, Nakaba’s story resonated well with Miike’s own upbringing in Yao City, Osaka. Plus, Miike was assured to have absolute creative freedom.
His take on Nakaba’s second novel, Kishiwada shonen gurentai: Chikemuri junjo-hen (translating roughly to Kishiwada Youth Gang: Blood and Smoke – the Innocent Chapter), released in foreign markets as Young Thugs: Innocent Blood, starts out like a rather typical Miike film.
High school friends Riichi (Koji Chihara), Yuji (Seiji Chihara), Kotetsu (Kyosuke Yabe) and Ryoko (Sarina Suzuki) are out to prank a disliked teacher for one last time. Ryoko lures the teacher into a yard behind the school with sexual promises while the boys are up on the roof. Once the teacher is in the right position, they drop a potted plant on his head. Ryoko quickly shoots a photo.
Ryoko is obsessed with documenting the life and pranks of her friends with photo snaps.
So, in the next scene, the four friends pose one last time in front of the blackboard in their classroom, tearing their graduation documents apart for the photo camera.
School’s out … what’s next? The first one to get a job is Ryoko, as a hairdresser. Kotetsu is next, he starts out as cook / bartender in a Girl’s Bar owned by Isami, the gang lord who seems to operate half of Kishiwada. Isami is played by Riichi Nakaba, the author of the Kishiwada Youth Gang novels.
The character representing young Riichi Nakaba in the movie is however Riichi, played by Koji Chihara. Riichi is not interested in any real job. Violent and impulsive as he is, he takes on a position as gangland enforcer, working for Isami.
Yuji takes the same path but he is a much softer guy than Riichi, for the most part trying to stay out of trouble.
Ryoko and Riichi are a couple by then, living in her tiny apartment. She adores Riichi for his courage, for the fights he wins.
The film zooms in on Riichi, on his gangland adventures that leave his face covered with bruises and bandages. One wild fight follows the other.
But then, a bar girl named Nahomi (Marie Kikuchi) appears, working at Kotetsu’s joint. She had a crush on Riichi way back when in middle school and now she wants him to be her true love.
Riichi, already bored with Ryoko, falls for Nahomi. Ryoko doesn’t take this lightly. When Riichi finally abandons her, she decides to destroy all the photos documenting the times with Riichi and her other friends at school.
Since she can’t do the deed herself, she asks Yuji to do it. Yuji can’t do it either, he hands the pictures over to Riichi who does burn them… but not all.
By this point, it becomes quite clear that this not a typical Takashi Miike film. Miike tends to go for the high-octane speed, for extreme violence, for bizarre cruelty, for the outright spectacular.
Not here. In this film, after a violent introduction focusing on Riichi, the proceedings turn more and more into careful character studies of the personnel involved.
That personnel includes by now not only the four original friends but also Nahomi as well as Masae (Hiroko Nakajima), a hairdresser colleague of Ryoko who becomes Yuji’s girlfriend.
The story meanders into many subplots but the focus on Riichi with his many violent encounters keeps it coherent, somewhat.
One day, Kotetsu borrows a car from Isami and invites Riichi and Yuji to a trip to the seaside.
I’ll not detail the events of that trip here. Let’s just say, things turn nasty soon, leading to the bizarre death of one of the three friends.
After that, things seem to generally calm down except for Riichi who tries to get back with Ryoko and, when that fails, heads for the Danjiri Float Festival where he is confronted by that one rival he had been battling throughout the movie.
The film clearly has a plot and one thing more or less logically follows the other but still, that plot hardly matters. Hardly any of the characters invokes any sympathy, whatever their relationships, whatever their struggles and fights. The film seems to keep a distance from them, just documenting whatever they do. Juvenile delinquents and their affairs… they will grow out of it eventually but for the time being that’s their life.
In fact, except Riichi, everyone is on his way somewhere by the end of the movie, more or less.
The Prequel: Young Thugs: Nostalgia
In 1998, Riichi Nakaba published another novel detailing parts of his youth and Takashi Miike was right there to turn it into another movie of what had become by then the Young Thugs franchise: Young Thugs: Nostalgia.
The film, a prequel to both Boys, Be Ambitious and Young Thugs: Innocent Blood, features the same four main characters, concentrating on their early upbringing under the difficult circumstances of Kishiwada City. Raised by and growing up among drunks, gamblers, scoundrels and competing juvenile delinquents, they soon turn vicious themselves…
The Director: Takashi Miike
Takashi Miike was born in 1960 in Yao, Osaka. Yao being a city on the Eastern outskirts of Osaka, bordering Nara Prefecture. Reportedly, in his teenage years, Miike was very much involved in the local motorcycle scene or in other words, in the wild and violent world of the then flourishing bosozoku youth gangs.
At age 18, Miike enrolled at a film school in Yokohama where legendary director Shohei Imamura became his mentor. Still, Miike was an undisciplined student and rarely showed up for class. When a TV production company contacted the school, looking for an unpaid intern, the school nominated Miike for the position.
This internship turned out to be Miike’s break into the industry. Into TV at first, where he took on a large number of assistant jobs. Miike had worked in TV for about 10 years when in the early 1990s a new film genre emerged in Japan: V-Cinema, meaning cheap productions that were not aimed at the theatrical market but went straight to the video rental outlets.
For a time in the 1990s, V-Cinema was what the pink movies had been for the aspiring directors in the generation preceding Miike: a wild playground. While budgets were minimal, the artistic freedom was almost limitless.
Miike churned out a large number of video movies in that period, all of them very quickly shot. Horror movies, samurai movies, yakuza movies, Miike got to try his hands at everything.
By the late 1990s, Miike’s films started to get recognized by international film festivals. Miike got to work with larger budgets and crossed over into the world of “legitimate” cinema, making movies for theatrical releases rather than straight-to-video cheap shots.
Those larger budgets didn’t stop Miike from going to the extremes with his movies. His movies tended to be violent in the extreme, featured daring sex scenes and were typically very fast-paced.
Movies like Audition (1999), Visitor Q (2001) and Ichi the Killer (2001) became international cult classics while at the same time getting banned in various countries because of their violent images.
Miike continued making movies at a breakneck speed, at times making five or more films per year.
By now, the formerly controversial Miike has become one of Japan’s most respected directors, honored at the film festivals in Venice and Cannes.
The Chihara Brothers
The character of Riichi, the central character of the film, is played by Koji Chihara. Chihara, born in 1974 in Kyoto Prefecture, is today better known as Chihara Junia (katakana spelling for Junior), his current stage name under which he also performs in the manzai comedy duo Chihara Kyodai (Chihara Brothers), along with his brother Seiji Chihara who plays the character of Yuji in Young Thungs: Innocent Blood.
Seiji Chihara (born in 1970) and Koji Chihara formed their comedy duo while Koji was still in high school in 1990. Manzai comedy duos typically consist of a foolish guy and a regular guy. Koji took on the foolish part. He was however not only the foolish guy, he was the quiet, sullen menace just at the same time. He came off so scary that a number of other comedians refused to appear with him on stage.
Exactly that aggressiveness got him his role in Young Thungs: Innocent Blood, his first major movie role.
In the following year, he was cast as the quiet killer Arano in Toshiaki Toyoda’s Pornostar (known in many international markets as Tokyo Rampage) who steps off the train in Shibuya, Tokyo with a duffel bag full of guns with the aim to kill as many yakuza as he can.
Koji Chihara’s intense acting in Pornostar (a misleading title, there is no porno in this film at all) made him an instant international cult star, Pornostar playing all the festivals.
Chihara preferred to work in Japan, however, where can still frequently be seen on TV as comedian, as actor in TV dramas and as regular guest in variety shows.
The same can be said about his brother Seiji who is today also very present on Japanese TV screens.
Osaka Locations
The film appears to have been entirely shot in Kishiwada City. There is a brief scene in which Kishiwada Castle appears, one of the few landmarks of the city.
To the most part, however, the film plays out on the back streets of the city. No particular sights there but the natural territory of the youth gangs depicted. If you look closely, the characters sometimes stand next to or walk by light poles featuring signs indicating the neighborhood. It always says Kishiwada City on those signs.
Kishiwada is however most famous for the Danjiri Float Festival held there. Now, there is a running gag going on with that festival. Whenever the characters sit in a coffee shop with a TV playing in the background, whenever they walk by a store with the old lady watching TV… the images on all those television sets will always, invariably, play footage documenting the Danjiri Float Festival.
The festival itself will make its grand entry in the final moments of the film.
