Shohei Imamura is half passionate artist, halfcultural anthropologist. His films muse (often chucklingly) on a very different Japan from any we knowfrom Kurosawa, Ozu and others: the world of the subproletariat, a raw, sensuous and often cruel universeuntouched by the tea ceremony, Zen or traditional gentility. Pigs and Battleships is set in the harbor town ofYokusuka, host to the U.S. Naval base, along narrow streets with prostitutes, pimps and assorted yakuza alllurking for the Yankee dollar. Kinta is a young street punk who joins the small-time Himori gang in theirambitious scheme to sell black-market hogs to the American fleet and, through shakedowns and extortions,gain a monopoly on pork, bellies and all. In the gangland-style war that ensues, Kinta finds himself the fallguy for those he trusted. Allegory is too kind a word for Imamura's brilliant protest against the Americanmilitary presence in Japan. His compositions emphasize evidence of American paraphernalia in even themost intimate details of Japanese life. Lives human and porcine are equally expendable, and if theAmericans he depicts truly behave like pigs to the Japanese, the local thugs in turn follow the example setby the occupiers. The closing shot of pigs thundering down the narrow streets must be unique in cinema.Imamura has no intentions of subtlety.