Shinoda's eighth film was his second collaboration with the young poet (and later, filmmaker) Shuji Terayama and composer Toru Takemitsu (see also Dry Lake, May 5). Tears on the Lion's Mane, set on the Yokohama waterfront, is a portrait of the suppressed passions and violence of youth, painted in the vital strokes of the New Wave: melodrama and poetry, blood and politics, rock'n'roll. The "lion" of the title is a young dockworker who tries to break up a strike out of a misguided sense of loyalty to his crooked boss. Whether in stately period dramas like Double Suicide and Gonza the Spearman, or in energetic gangland sagas like this and Killers on Parade (see May 6), Shinoda consistently explores the theatrics of life in a society in which honor and loyalty are so deeply rooted as to function as an almost classic notion of fate. Shinoda himself considers this the first film in which he fully achieved his ambitions.