A REAL JAPANESE MAFIA ‘YAKUZA’ STORY: “TOKYO VICE”
Cinema Writer/Film Critic Efe TEKSOY; he wrote by giving an exemplifying the views of great thinkers, philosophers and classical writers, the “TOKYO VICE” series in the genre of crime, drama and thriller, for America’s Los Angeles based Internet Newspaper @alaturkaonline.
AN EXTRAORDINARY JOURNEY TO THE UNDERGROUND WORLD OF JAPAN
HBO Max series Tokyo Vice, based on the 2009 book “Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan” by American journalist and author Jake Adelstein. The crime, thriller, and detective drama series, is inspired by the real-life rituals- traditions, and history of Yakuza organizations that date back to the Tokugawa Period, spanning 1603 and 1868. In the lead role star actors; Ken Watanebe who was nominated for an Oscar for his role as Katsumoto in The Last Samurai, and Ansel Elgort an American actor who shines in 2017’s Baby Driver and 2021’s West Side Story productions. Tokyo Vice, which will impress you deeply when you watch it, is definitely a production that should not be missed. Throughout the series, we see that the desire and will to power forms the basis of Tokyo Vice. In this sense, the concept of the Will to Power by the Great German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and the concepts of the violence and obedience mentioned by the German political philosopher and social theorist Hannah Arendt emerge.
TOPIC OF SERIES
Investigative journalist Jake Adelstein, who works for one of Tokyo’s biggest newspapers, will step into the underworld dominated by the city’s most powerful crime bosses, together with the detective Hiroto Katagiri, whom he met.
Stars; Ansel Elgort, Ken Watanabe, Rachel Keller, Shô Kasamatsu, Ella Rumpf, Rinko Kikuchi, Shun Sugata, Takaki Uda, Kosuke Tanaka, Masato Hagiwara, Eugene Nomura and Ayumi Tanida.
DETAILS
-When it first entered production in 2013, Daniel Radcliffe (the lead actor in the Harry Potter film series), would play the role of Adelstein.
-Actor Ansel Elgort, learned to speak Japanese fluently for the drama and took writing training from professional journalists in preparation for his role.
– Danny Burstein and Jessica Hecht (who play Ansel Elgort’s parents), played husband and wife Tevye and Golde in the 2015 Broadway revival of “Fiddler on the Roof”.
A CRIME EMPIRE
Offering a nostalgic look at the nineties, the HBO Max series presents a generation gap story (in Ken Watanabe’s words) adorned with a kind of father-son story. Thus, the story; We see that it is based on the work of Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev, one of the greatest classical writers of Russian literature, and Sigmund Freud‘s concept of The Oedipus Complex in psychology. The first part of the series; directed by Michael Mann, master director of Heat, The Last of the Mohicans, The Insider and Collateral films. Tokyo Vice, the new crime drama and thriller series from HBO Max, is a focusing on Yakuza families and examining the corruption of Tokyo’s police force in the nineties as well as the justice system from a socio-political perspective. French philosopher Voltaire, one of the greatest thinkers of The Age of Enlightenment, states that the basis of all societies is justice. Tokyo Vice, on the other hand, presents injustice and cruelty within the framework of a story that works in a Neo-noir style. In this sense, we see that Voltaire’s view of justice, which has a profound meaning, was restricted and hindered by the Yakuzas in the Tokyo of the nineties.
EFE TEKSOY
