Shohei Imamura's Japan is a raw, sensuous, and often cruel universeuntouched by the tea ceremony, Zen, or conventional gentility. Pigs andBattleships is set in the harbor town of Yokusuka, host to the U.S. Naval base,along narrow streets with prostitutes, pimps, and assorted yakuza all lurking forthe Yankee dollar. Kinta is a young street punk who joins the small-time Himorigang in their ambitious scheme to sell black-market hogs to the American fleet.In the gangland-style war that ensues, Kinta finds himself the fall guy for thosehe trusted. Allegory is too kind a word for Imamura's brilliant protest againstthe American military presence in Japan. His compositions emphasize evidence ofAmerican paraphernalia in even the most intimate details of Japanese life. Liveshuman and porcine are equally expendable, and if the Americans he depicts behavelike pigs to the Japanese, the local thugs in turn follow their example. The shotof pigs thundering down the narrow streets must be unique in cinema.