Yakuza film

Yakuza film (Japanese: ヤクザ映画, Hepburn: Yakuza Eiga) is a popular film genre in Japanese cinema which focuses on the lives and dealings of yakuza, Japanese organized crime syndicates.

Early films

In the silent film era, films depicting bakuto (precursors to modern yakuza) as Robin Hood-like characters were common. They often portrayed historical figures who had accumulated legends over time as "sympathetic but lonely figures, forced to live an outlaw existence and longing, however hopelessly, to return to straight society."Kunisada Chūji was a popular subject, such as in Daisuke Itō's three-part A Diary of Chuji's Travels from 1927. During World War II, the Japanese government used cinema as wartime propaganda, and as such depictions of bakuto generally faded. Mark Schilling named Akira Kurosawa's Drunken Angel from 1948 as the first to depict post-war yakuza in his book The Yakuza Movie Book : A Guide to Japanese Gangster Films, although he noted it does not follow the genre's common themes. The Occupation of Japan that followed World War II also monitored the films being made. However, when the occupation ended in 1952, period-pieces of all types returned to popularity. A notable modern yakuza example is 1961's Hana to Arashi to Gang by Teruo Ishii which launched a series that depicted contemporary gang life including gang warfare.