Category Archives: Crime film

Kinji Fukasaku’s Street Mobster focuses on the short, fast life of Isamu Okita (Bunta Sugawara), a chinpira or low–level street punk with no firm gang allegiance, trying to carve out a criminal living in an unknown Japanese city sometime after World War Two.

His mother was a prostitute who drowned while on a drunk, his father unknown. As Okita’s narration over a photomontage at the beginning tells us the date of his birth, August 15, 1945, the day Japan formally surrendered, is considered unlucky.

Okita doesn’t care, he makes his own luck, pimping, brawling and extorting his way through life with his gang of fellow chinpira, until their activities come to the attention of the local yakuza, the Takigawa, who want their cut of the takings. His refusal to pay homage results in a severe beating, which Okita pays back by charging into a sauna and slashing several yakuza goons with a butcher’s knife.

Upon his release from prison many years later, Okita finds the world has changed. The streets are full of “straight people” enjoying the prosperity of Japan’s economic boom in the sixties. The yakuza, meanwhile have retired to their glass and concrete office towers to manage their illegal activities.

It’s not long before Okita has formed another gang of chinpira.… Read more