Tattoo Irezumi Ari 
TATTOO＜刺青＞あり 「TATTOO Irezumi Ari」
Release Date: June 05th, 1982
Duration: 103 mins.
Director: Banmei Takahashi
Writer: Takuya Nishioka
Starring: Ryudo Uzaki, Keiko Takahashi, Yoshio Harada, Misako Watanabe, Jiro Chiba, Kazuko Aoki,
Banmei Takahashi’s early career was mostly spent in the pink film genre but he also worked in horror and crime. One of his more mainstream films was Tattoo Ari, a biopic of Akiyoshi Umekawa, a 30-year-old man who made national headlines in March 1979 deadly bank hold-up in Osaka in which he was shot dead. His intention was to achieve infamy just as much as to steal a whole lot of money. At least, that’s the story pf Tattoo Ari.
Think bank heist films and A Dog Day Afternoon (1975) may come to mind. Takahashi and his writer Takuya Nishioka (another pink film man and writer on Toshiharu Ikeda’s Mermaid Legend (1984), and Shinji Somai’s PP Rider (1983)) go another route and focus almost on entirely backstory presenting how an egotistic juvenile delinquent got to the point of becoming a fame-seeking killer.
Thus, after starting in media res with the results of the bank siege and Akiyoshi at the morticians, the plot rewinds to him as a teen gone bad in a rural part of Hiroshima Prefecture. From killing a housewife at 15, through his time after juvenile detention when he gets an elaborate tattoo (hence the film’s title) for intimidation purposes despite having no yakuza affiliation, his stint as a girls bar manager in downtown Osaka, and his end as bank robber, the story establishes that Akiyoshi operates with two trains of thought, a death ideation and an out-of-control ego, and the majority of the film is spent displaying these aspects of his character.
For audiences at the time, this must have had a ripped-from-the-headline feel but for today these factors are fairly commonplace for criminal origin stories. They made interesting because of cultural specificity. Fashion trends of the 70s, just as Japan’s bubble economy era hits full throttle, are on show in how Akiyoshi taps into nouveau riche lifestyle choices like a nice apartment, ridiculous perm and fancy clothes, and a flashy red car. The OTT ostentation is pointed out when he pops up in his mother’s more rural hometown and locals look askance at his style. His studying Haruhiko Oyabu’s hardboiled stories¹ lend him a few ideas of how to control and kill people which he puts into practice when managing women and soon the narcissism and his death drive feel like they feed off each other.
After presenting this flashiness, the filmmakers zero in on the idea that under Akiyoshi’s materialism and bluster is an immature mind, which is exposed by the women in his life.
Throughout the film he has a dependency on his mother whose selfless love, even in the face of his violence, offers affirmation of his existence and props up his ego at various points in adulthood. It also fuels his desperation to grow up and be a man. This desperation comes into sharper focus with Michiyo, a beautiful hostess who likes a bit of rough. She is initially charmed by his boyish aspects and loyalty to his mother but his violent obsession with her puts him in the orbit of yakuza whose mature, confident, and controlled exertion of violence serve to humble Akiyoshi in the moment and later act as the catalyst to knock over the bank.
As Michiyo, Keiko Sekine (she would later go on to marry Banmei Takahashi and star in DOOR) perfectly modulates her performance as a confident woman brought low and left rueful after escaping a monster. It culminates in a fiery confrontation in a rainstorm outside a Kobe rowhouse where she pushes off Akiyoshi’s advances, stands up resolute, spitting rain from her mouth and utters the deadly line “I only like real men.” Yes, this set in motion the Akiyoshi’s final move to fulfilling his death drive but it is also a stunningly cool moment for her character, an inadvertent femme fatale for a guy too immature and selfish to see further than his ego.
Misako Watanabe (who worked with Masaki Kobayashi (Kwaidan (1964) and would later show up in The Great Passage (2013)) is quietly marvellous as his mother. There are a few shots that linger in the mind surrounding a repetition of the image of her collecting him repeated in the film – collecting his ashes from a morgue, meeting him at his first arrest, meeting him upon his return from Osaka. This is the motif of a mother’s love. When she is framed as small and alone in that morgue scene, there is the temptation to pity her but throughout the film Watanabe shows her character has grit through her argumentative attitude with the police and sternness with her boy and there is the sense she will keep going after the credits role.
Bringing up the women he abuses sounds dangerously close to victim blaming but the film uses their characters as a mirror to reveal Akiyoshi as weak.
Any critique of authority comes with the men in his life, a layabout father, older criminals who abandon a clearly out of control boy, and a reform system not up to reforming its wards. Audience sympathy will lie with the women who are victims of circumstance and survive Akiyoshi’s violent behaviour and Ryudo Uzaki is easy to hate as he gives a committed performance.
For his efforts at capturing character and place, the film became a mainstream box-office hit and won Takahashi the award for Best Director at the 4th Yokohama Film Festival. What we have now is a solid biopic with stirring performances and the rich atmosphere of Showa-era Osaka as Takahashi films on location in Nishinari Prefecture and neighbouring districts, Shin Sekai, Namba and Dotombori.
¹ The films Cruel Gun Story (1964) and Youth of the Beast (1963) are adaptations of his novels.