While The Godfather romanticized the American Mafia in the early 1970s, Kinji Fukasaku's five-film series known as The Yakuza Papers: Battles Without Honor & Humanity revolutionized the Japanese yakuza film with unprecedented intensity. A post-World War II epic that broke Japanese box-office records, this complex, utterly authentic cycle of gangster films replaced the popular ninkyo or "chivalry" films of the '60s with jitsuroku, an entirely new breed of gangster film that rose from the ashes of Hiroshima and post-war reconstruction, depicting a meticulously detailed "alternate history" that had been ignored by the "official" factual record.
Battles Without Honor and Humanity

NR1h 39m7.4

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During the violent chaos of post-War Japanese black market, a young gangster called Shozo Hirono has to keep up with the rapid shifts of power between unscrupulous bosses.

Hiroshima Death Match

NR1h 40m7.5

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A young criminal joins a yakuza family to kill the gangsters who beat him up, but falls in love with his boss' widow niece, piling up enemies and corpses along his wayward way.

Proxy War

NR1h 42m7.3

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Yakuza boss Shozo Hirono must choose his alliances carefully as the local gangster family affiliations prove themselves to be wildly unstable, causing gang conflicts to slowly escalate.

Police Tactics

NR1h 41m7.3

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Conflicts between Hirono's family and Yamamori's family (and their allies) are made more tense by the ambitious underlings and the police's efforts to impose a crackdown on the gangs.

Final Episode

NR1h 40m7.3

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While Hirono is in prison, his rival Takeda turns his own crime organization into a political party, whose two executives stir up new tensions in their thirst for power.

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