Pigs and Battleships

An entire economy has grown around the American base at Yokosuka: bars, black market goods, prostitution, and a pig farm fed on the waste that comes off the base. Young Kinta wants into the local gang while his girlfriend Haruko is trying to pull him out of the whole arrangement. Shohei Imamura shows postwar Japan without deference to anybody. The Americans, the gangsters and the small men living off their own neighbours all stand in the same light. The pig metaphor is crude on purpose, and the ending takes that crudeness the whole way: the stampede of pigs through the streets is the film's most famous sequence. Its cost and its tone opened a rift between Imamura and the Nikkatsu studio, and he was kept from directing for a while afterwards. The hard part is the perspective. The violence done to the woman is shown plainly and the film comforts nobody. Who it is for: viewers who love the Japanese new wave and hard social satire. Who it is not for: anyone looking for a character to side with.