Junya Sato

MUBI:
A spectacular drama depicting the truth about the birth of the world’s top company “Toyota Motor”.Read More »

letterboxd:
Hikaru, an ordinary man, discovers a way to unleash the supernatural powers hidden inside his soul, allowing him to cure others with his newfound “ki” healing power.Read More »

About Soviet and Japanese volley-ball players who are both rivals and friends. The events cover the period from the 1976 Montreal Olympics to the eve of XXII Olympics in Moscow.Read More »

Adventure-drama based on the life of Naomi Uemura (Nishida), the first Japanese mountain climber to scale most of the world’s highest peaks and explore the arctic and Antarctic.Read More »

Very little information out there in English on this one, but it appears to be one of many filmatisations of Shiro Ozaki’s novel Jinsei Gekijo. Starstudded and directed in three segments by three directors. Seems to involve lots of yakuzas and politics. And sex (a golden shower!).Read More »

1782. A Japanese ship named Shinsho-maru is blown off course and severely battered during a wild storm, and wounds up floundering off a remote Aleut island after drifting seven months at sea. The remainder of the crew is taken in and given shelter by an expedition of Russian seal hunters, but forced to survive in very harsh and sparse conditions. Will they ever see their homeland again?Read More »

Quote:
Jitsuroku is usually translated as “true story,” which in the yakuza movies of the seventies meant not so much historical accuracy as it did fights and blood of a new kind. The most famous of the jitsuroku yakuza movies are Kinji Fukasaku’s 5-part Battles Without Honor or Humanity, whose title neatly summarizes the change. The sixties yakuza movie had shown plenty of fights and, as effects gradually improved, increasing gore and blood spatters, but the core of the story was almost always a point of honor within the Yakuza Code and a hero with a sense of human feeling and responsibility. In the seventies, The Code disappeared along with the humane hero and we were offered only the battles and the blood.Read More »

A war breaks out on the streets between rivalry Yakuza clans.Read More »

Letterboxd-Review:
A superb proto-jitsuroku type yakuza film by Junya Sato. Fumio Watanabe (in probably his best role) is a wonderfully cast against type as a crime boss who actually cares for his men and is the first one to barge into fight when rivals come knocking on the door. Powerful political figure Eijiro Yanagi becomes his consultant, after which short tempered rival boss Ryohei Uchida starts feeling the fire under his arse. Things get even more heated after Watanabe takes a Ginza gambling joint from the Chicago mafia with the assistance of machine gun happy lone wolf Noboru Ando. Tetsuro Tamba, Hideo Murota and Rinichi Yamamoto are a detective squad in a desperate battle against red tape while trying to bring the gangs down. The story is fictional, but the film feels like a jitsuroku movie. Sato draws an entire underworld map with cops, gangsters and political players all placed on the same chess table. The film is talkative, but never boring, feels extremely matter of fact, and comes with a fabulous musical score by Masaru Sato.Read More »