This Japanese Life provides some historical context for Kinji Fukasaku’s film, Battle Royale–including an incident from Fukasaku‘s own life as a student drafted into a munitions factory, writer Yukio Mishima and the Hagakure: “Since the film deliberately omits much of the novel’s WW2-inspired alternative reality, I look at Kitano and see a modern-era Japanese glorification of war, the heady days of the samurai, days which are still longed for by many far-right conservatives in Japan. If the novel is about the victory of that regime, the film is about false nostalgia for a world where it had won.” (Thanks, Hunter!)