Setting: Tokyo and Osaka from 1946 to 1956.

Synopsis:
Ishikawa Rikio was born in 1924 in Mito and ran away from home to Tokyo in 1940, where he joined the Kawada mob. There he was first arrested in 1942 when a rival punk insulted his boss. When the war ended, the Kawada gang was one of the largest in the Shinjuku area, and Rikio the most violent in protecting their territory.
One day, Imai Kozaburo, an old pal of Rikio's from the detention facility, assembles Rikio and some others to raid the gambling den of a group of Taiwanese acting too big for their britches. They raid the place and in the ensuing chase from the American MPs, Rikio hides in the room of house maid named Chleko. Accidentally burning the mat in her room, he takes pity on her. Rikio leaves to join his pals in jail, but the cops soon release them out of thanks for beating up the Taiwanese gang. Returning to Chieko's room to get the money he left with her, Rikio rapes the young girl.
Seeing the men of a rival Ikebukuro gang entering their territory, Rikio brutally beats one up, but that only earns the ire of Kawada, who has no desire for a gang war. When the other boss, Kajiki Noboru, refuses Kawada's apologies, war seems imminent until Nozu Kisaburo, the top Shinjuku boss who is now running for the Diet, suggests Kawada use his connections with the Americans to get them to intercede. The fight is avoided, but Nozu loses the election. Soon afterwards, Rikio is gambling at Nozu's place when he is refused a loan. Angered, he torches the boss' car, which earns him a severe beating from Kawada. Drunk and fired up by Imai, who insists Rikio should leave the Kawada gang, Rikio returns to the office to attack his own boss.
The attempted murder earns Rikio a year and a half in jail from the police, but his act was a challenge to the rules of the entire yakuza world. Even after he is released, Rikio is banned from the Tokyo area for ten years and is forced, with Imai's help, to flee to Osaka. There the tuberculosis he caught from Chieko worsens and he takes to shooting up drugs. He soon teams up with another addict, Ozaki Katsuji, and wanders back to Tokyo after only a year. He shows up at the gambling den of Imai, who is now the leader of his own gang. His presence proves a consternation for Imai, who now is in a position where he must keep peace with Kawada and the other gangs. He tries to convince Rikio to leave town, but Rikio, upset that even this friend seems willing to betray him, stabs him. A week later, he returns to finish the deed by shooting Imai dead. The next day, the police arrest him in a mob scene involving dozens from the Imai and Kawada gangs.
On May 9, 1950, Rikio is convicted and sentenced to ten years of hard labor but appeals to a higher court. In the meantime, Chieko succeeds despite her ill-health in raising the money to get him out on bail. Rikio registers her as his lawful wife, but only ten days later she commits suicide. Carrying her ashes under his arm, Rikio returns to Kawada to ask him for the land and money needed to start his own gang. Looking at the wild gangster chewing on the bones of his dead wife, Kawada can only think Rikio has gone mad. Refused the money, Rikio steals it to pay for the gravestone he had ordered. Soon, he is severely beaten by other gangsters, but manages miraculously to survive. His appeal rejected, Rikio is sent to prison where he commits suicide by leaping off a building on February 2, 1956. On his cell wall, he left the phrase, "What a laugh! Thirty years of frenzy!" And on his grave: "honor."

Notes:
If Fukasaku Kinji's earlier Tarnished Code of Yakuza ("Jingi naki tatakai," 1973) had chiseled away at the foundations of a yakuza genre structured by the ritualistic conflict between duty and feelings (with the former always prevailing), Graveyard of Honor is its demolition, depicting in Ichikawa Rikio the antithesis to the code-bound gangster, the ultimate embodiment of libidinal "freedom." Fukasaku's skillful use of such documentary techniques as archival photos, black and white footage, and interviews not only plays with the audiences genre expectations, it continues Tarnihed Code of Yakuza's effort to write the contradictions of postwar Japanese history through its underworld.