Word: yakuza
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Just before the final shootout in Brother, the yakuza played by Takeshi Kitano walks into a diner out in the California desert. The old man behind the counter takes a long look at him and says, "You Japanese are very inscrutable...
...Loner, whom Kitano embodies in most of his films, is bound to no nation and needs no subtitles to translate his brute magnetism. It doesn't even matter which side of the law he is nominally on: as an officer in Violent Cop and Fireworks (Hana-bi) or a yakuza in Boiling Point, Sonatine and Brother, he carries a gun and a grudge. Like the uninflected killer played by Alain Delon in Jean-Pierre Melville's classic 1967 crime film, aptly titled Le Samourai, Kitano walks slowly, stares blankly; he might be a patient whose life the surgeons have saved...
Rumors about sumo fixing have been around almost as long as the sport. Four years ago, a tabloid magazine in Japan ran a series of articles alleging yakuza (Japanese mafia) ties and match rigging. Making the claims then were two ex-wrestlers, who died suddenly within 15 hours of each other in the same Nagoya hospital and of the same respiratory ailment. Sumo is indeed filled with mystery. Itai is aware of the fate of previous whistle-blowers. One of the deceased wrestlers was his stable master...