Ninkyo and Jitsuroku (Yakuza Films)
This is the band from when Japan made the most films. Annual domestic production peaked at 547 films in 1960, and audiences had peaked a little earlier, in 1958, at about 1.127 billion admissions — more than ten times today's numbers. Out of studios running like factories, churning out new double bills every week, a style was born. Jinsei Gekijo: Hishakaku (1963) was a hit, and it opened a decade of ninkyo yakuza films. In 1973, Battles Without Honor and Humanity traded that stylized beauty for the dry texture of jitsuroku, true-account filmmaking. And the audience kept shrinking. Television moved into homes, and by 1968 admissions had fallen to a third of the 1958 level, and by 1978 to a seventh.
Still, what came out of this band traveled further than you'd expect. When Quentin Tarantino visited Japan in 2013, he shared something Kinji Fukasaku had told him directly: ninkyo, honor, is something you have to do — even if it's the last thing in the world you want to do.
It's often said that Japan led the world in film production at the time. I tried to write that here too, but I couldn't find statistics comparing countries. So I'm not writing it. Making a lot of films and being first in the world are two different things.