An upscale Japanese hotel hires Mahiru Inoue, a lawyer adept at dealing with the Yakuza, to help them rid their hotel of the local gangsters so they can get a contract for a meeting of important foreign officials.
Acting
Nobuko Miyamoto's deadpan destruction of fragile mob egos.
Writing
Itami's surgical dissection of yakuza mythology through pure embarrassment.
Direction
Turning bureaucratic procedure into edge-of-seat tension.
Director
Jūzō Itami
Nobuko Miyamoto
Mahiru Inoue
Yasuo Daichi
Suzuki
Akira Takarada
Kobayashi
Takehiro Murata
Taro Wakasugi
Yuji Miyake
Hotel Man
Shirō Itō
Iriejima
Akira Nakao
Ibaki
Hōsei Komatsu
Hanaoka
Toshiro Yanagiba
Yakuza
Kōji Sekiyama
Yakuza Boss
Guts Ishimatsu
Yakuza
Tetsu Watanabe
Akechi
Shigeru Yazaki
Judge
Masahiko Tsugawa
Foreign Office Eugene
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
This film so enraged real yakuza that director Jūzō Itami was attacked and slashed on the face by five gang members shortly after release.
The term 'minbo' refers to a specific legal strategy for debt collection — the entire film is essentially a procedural tutorial disguised as entertainment.
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