A yakuza movie for kids?!? And not bad for one at all, while still throwing extra treats to yakuza and music fans…
For all the inroads it’s made in the West in the past couple of decades, karaoke — even if a household name and somewhere in every city now — remains in the minds of many and in overall statistics as a niche usually just for select occasions and select people. For Japan, however, Karaoke has quite arguably long been the favourite and most wide-reaching group pastime — more than movies, video/computer games, partying or concerts (why bother listening to others do what you know you can?). Karaoke is still at the top because it’s the only one that can truly appeal across the board: kids, adults, and seniors; clean-cut corporate spaces, sophisticated ballrooms, everyday cafes and seedy bars/clubs; classmates, colleagues, and communes; NEET, salarymen, CEOs and even politicians. So why wouldn’t it also appeal to anikis, kumichōs and chinpiras, even if movies and media reports are less likely to detail that part of yakuza life?
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Satomi (Jun Saitō) is lead soprano for his school choir. While usually on top of things, he’s just led his group to a lacklustre 3rd place performance at the Osaka Prefectural Junior High Choir competition semifinals. Even with somebody falling short of expectations, their Sensei Momo Morimoto (Kyoko Yoshine, Iwane: Sword of Serenity) still believes the glass is 1/3rd full so only has words of encouragement and praise, and deputy soprano Nakagawa (Yagi Miki) feels for Satomi and whatever issues he may have going on. But backup soprano Wada (Kiyoto Ushiro) is enraged to the point of demanding Satomi is either pushed to his limits to properly lead them or pushed out of the choir in favour of a real singer! After all, by all indications it will be Satomi and his team’s very last chance at choral glory, both because it’s his senior year and for the feared fast fading of his heavenly pure pre-pubescent voice.
Meanwhile on the dirty side of town — “Minami-Ginza” vice district to be exact — there’s another looming contest making for a more… pressing matter. Yakuza Kyouji Narita (Go Ayano, Hard Days) aka “Crazy Narita” — wait, not even “aka” as that seems his real name — is overwhelmed with trepidation because it’s almost time for The Boss’ (Kazuki Kitamura, Ley Lines) notorious annual “party” that gathers all the gang for a high-stakes karaoke contest. Those stakes aren’t high for the winner, but just the sole #1 loser, who gets branded with a personally applied, ignominiously chosen, excruciatingly shoddily chiseled amateur tattoo. The very thought of it combined with Kyouji’s (justified) utter lack of confidence to avoid it leaves him in a staggering stupor until he stumbles around the choir competition venue. It’s there that Kyouji hears the powerful but soothing voice of Satomi; he immediately forcefully befriends the boy and inserts himself as his protégé with a simple, politely intimidating request: Let’s go karaoke!
But compared to a yakuza, Satomi is just a choir boy! Worse yet, compared to anyone else Satomi is just a choir boy too… And come to think of it, even compared to other choir boys (and girls!) Satomi is just a choir boy — noticeably naive, innocent, hesitant and timid to the point of not merely matching but surpassing stereotypes and even figures of speech. Everyone around Satomi (or not around him much any longer) — including mum Yūko (Maki Sakai, I Am What I Am, now in another comic motherly role) and papa Harumi (Tomu Miyazaki) — is getting perplexed at his increasingly haphazard and half-hearted appearances everywhere from the dinner table to the practice room. But he indeed has a lot on his mind: not only the choir contest and his forced mentorship with Kyouji, but escalating danger of getting sucked into gangland fears and feuds, in what could be the most dramatic friendly clash between the heaven of parochial duty and hell of underworld duty since 1938 (Angels with Dirty Faces)!
Good heavens — how things have changed for Japan’s powerhouse publishing/production company that once ruled both the book and film industries during their brief 1980s peak, Kadokawa. If one wants a way to perfectly summarise the changes that swept the functioning, sourcing and content of their company altogether, look no further than its thematic relationship with the yakuza. Evidently, Kadokawa’s most high-profile regular-ish yakuza film (i.e. not counting plainly outlandish ones like Sailor Suit and Machine Gun [1981]) of only a few during their glory days was an adaptation of a hard-boiled crime fiction novel, from a director who’d come out of seedy vice and pink movies with his style only partially mitigated for The Lady in the Black Dress (1987).
While the basic window dressing has stayed remarkably similar over 3 & 1/2 decades later, the ultimate mood is as different as night and day. Now instead of seeing crime fiction adapted we are, of course, seeing shōnen manga adapted that way. Black Dress’ idol star had to tread through yakuza and their skirmishes, domestic abuses, women of the night, corrupt cops and more nasty elements threatening to pull her into a dark place in every sense of the term, while Let’s Go Karaoke!’s hero happily goes about his sunny school and schoolyard shenanigans with the yakuza having to come into his territory. So yes, one could easily lament just how distant the good old days (when they had so much great confidence in the mettle of their young audiences) feel now, as seeing Let’s Go Karaoke will probably make that stark difference settle in with that much more clarity
From a western vantage point, “The Yakuza vs. The Sopranos” doesn’t sound like a bad matchup at all. But don’t confuse ‘Tomi with Tony…
All the worst fears about this movie, however, can be allayed for knowing it’s in reasonably good and intelligent hands. Between a script from Akiko Nogi — best known internationally for I Am a Hero (2016) and domestically for the Library Wars series — and source material from mangaka Yama Wayama, there’s a certain feminine shōjo sensitivity to this shōnen story that gives an agreeable enough balance for either. And the movie really does do its best to try to give rhyme and reason to the preposterous premise, questions as to why any self-respecting yakuza would turn to a random kid for such help, and even plausible reactions to its implausibilities (“Is he a perv?!”, wonder the girls out the window upon seeing a black-suited man for whom it’s apparent he’s not a parent standing around outside the junior high school)
The director — incredibly prolific for this day and age — is also safely tested. This is in fact familiar territory for Nobuhiro Yamashita in each major way except for the yakuza part: he’s themed movies around people learning and/or rehearsing music at least a few times noting La La La at Rock Bottom (2015) and most famously Linda Linda Linda (2005); he’s themed them around junior/high schoolers at least a few other times for the aforementioned Lindas, A Gentle Breeze in the Village (2007), and another very recent film (out of four [so far!] just from this year!), Swimming in a Sand Pool (2024).
What drew this reviewer to this film, however — after being weighed against aforementioned doubts that made deciding on it far from immediate — was its dual thematic foot in two personal longtime core interests (except during the times they’ve qualified as genuine obsessions): the yakuza and Japanese popular music. It indeed strives to put the two in (figurative if not literal) harmony, with a plausibly agreeable evergreen selection for yakuza. So they’re up for it, whether it’s reliving Akira Terao’s golden hour (or “ruby hour”) with the nation’s biggest hit of the 80s — he’s usually known by Western fans for his role in Ran (1985) instead (though some of the very recent wave of gaijin “city pop” fans may also bump across him) — or the hyperbolic manly funk of “Tiger & Dragon” from the Crazy Ken Band. The latter’s work already has a history of being attached to yakuza entertainment including the song’s retroactively eponymous 2005 TV show and the videogame Yakuza 2 (2006)
Story-wise, however, LGK’s primary appeal lies in dropping the emblematic pinnacle of innocence — a choir boy right at the cusp of his literal and figurative apotheosis — into attempted harmony with the proverbial and perhaps (once caught and charged) also literal pinnacle of guilt in an aggressive yakuza tough. When noting the conversely novel familiarity of that concept at heart (with more modern reality TV interpolations), LGK not too unreasonably treats it in similar manner to relatively similar movies about boys forming unlikely, uneasy bonds with monsters, aliens or warlocks. For that, this movie’s human monster takes its boy into a world no less alien or terrifyingly magical.
Even as a kid-targeting “G” movie (also as in “General Audiences” — a rating seldom applied to conflict-oriented live-action Japanese cinema now), Karaoke proves surprisingly dedicated in its efforts to seek real gangster cinema credentials beyond anything expected of it for the supporting yakuza roles. Kazuki Kitamura led and co-led several of the more notable yakuza movies of the 90s including from Takashi Miike and Rokurō Mochizuki — not to mention internationally from the US (Kill Bill Volume 1 & 2) to Indonesia (Killers) — all the way up to Masato Harada’s Hell Dogs (2022). The casting dug deeper for 00s V-cinema fixture Kyosuke Yabe. But one true legend drops by: Masaya Kato, who’s played quite memorable yakuza roles of several types across several decades including leads in early V-cinema and Miike movies, and even managed to stand out in HK’s star-studded Shinjuku Incident (2009) and yakuza mega-ensemble piece Bad City (2023).
As for the star, however, Gō Ayano has proven one of the more versatile among the later arriving of today’s most established stars (debuting in 2003). More specifically on a yakuza front, he’s best known for his recent work driving one of the most sentimental serious yakuza films of the 21st century (and one of the most sentimental altogether outside the chivalry film genre), A Family aka Yakuza and the Family (2021). That made him the perfect actor to turn to for a part-parody yakuza role that jumps from soft to hard and utterly vulnerable to nearly invulnerable at the drop of a tune.
As such, the movie recognises a key part of its fun to be seeing and hearing Ayano (and occasional other yakuza) austerely clowning around in ongoing sight/sound gags, or showing their (surprise!) lesser thresholds for criticism. For the karaoke segments it’s not just about the cacophony itself, but Ayano’s also-awful command of English (then again, as with many yakuza and as is also reflected in the title, even his Japanese is pretty bad from a formal standpoint). But the one who may turn out to be the even greater antagonistic force than any yakuza (and my favourite character/performance among the quite respectable lineup of kid actors) is Wada, whose nearly every last sentence consists of trash talk — if only the yakuza had scouted him instead of Satomi for that!
The additional welcomeness of the karaoke sessions stems from a certain anticipatory appeal to hearing/seeing what Japanese popular songs the gang (and we do mean gang) will be trying to perform next, then identifying the songs and matching/mismatching them with their yakuza singers. While one will have to have at least some degree of familiarity with Japanese popular music of the last few decades (true yakuza don’t screw around with Anglo/American music or Kpop like most Japanese youth want to nowadays) to get much out of that dimension (or a lot more to get the most out of it), it can still be a decent little songbook primer for the completely unfamiliar. And there still will be a couple tunes that the average Japanese entertainment fan of most stripes will recognize, like the Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995) theme.
The karaoke sessions and yakuza stars still aren’t the only sources of cross-referential fun. Some of the movie’s best moments are found in cute intermissions of the boys watching (unidentified) classic movies at their school cinema club, as Satomi wonders what a gangster is when watching White Heat (1949), and what in the name of heaven is wrong with adults in general from a certain 1948 movie that will be a delight for those in the know.
Quite nice — as in pleasant, innocuous and likable alike — for the audience it aims for but still remarkably respectable a little outside of it, Let’s Go Karaoke for all its modesty is better than many of its type would have even bothered trying to be. While outwardly making a mockery of the yakuza it’s actually paying unlikely tribute to them; but in a manner still in tune with shōnen kid’s entertainment that doesn’t glorify them. The yakuza are instead observed and respected as the loud, boisterous and in a way, enviously free fixture in the Japanese culture, psyche and capitalist drive that they are — just like karaoke, if a little more violent and a little less legal.
“When I had looked at the shadows on the wall I started running into the night to find the truth in me”
Let’s Go Karaoke screens as part of CAMERA JAPAN Festival 2024.
Off key notes
Normally, I’m hardly one to think much about translation choices whether subtitlers are real loose and localising or translation fundamentalists — many years of having to scrape by with awful subs for import DVDs back in the day numbed me to all but the worst, I suppose. But I will say that for this particular case, doing a few bits of R-rated subtitles is probably not the best choice. Even when such dialogue can fully reasonably be translated that way it doesn’t have to be either, as it carries a somewhat heavier weight in the Western entertainment landscape (while Japanese ironically does more in real life instead). So having R-rated language in a movie that so clearly aims to appeal most to kids potentially cuts it off from some of its best audience. I know many Western and especially American moviegoers/buyers — even adults, let alone kids — tend to have a disinclination towards subtitles anyway, but the surprise big success of Godzilla Minus One (2023) in original Japanese form proved it’s not or at least is no longer set in stone.
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