Imamura's first fully-realized work takes a hard but ironically humorous look at a robust side of Japan: its lower classes, whose world is untouched by the tea ceremony, Zen or traditional gentility. Set at the U.S. Naval base at Yokusuka, Pigs and Battleships is also a brilliant protest against the effects of the continued American military presence in Japan; Imamura's compositions emphasize evidence of American paraphernalia in even the most intimate details of Japanese life. The story follows a young street punk, Kinta, who joins the small-time Himori gang in their ambitious scheme to sell black market pigs to the American fleet. Japanese film critic Joan Mellen writes in "The Waves at Genji's Door": "The Americans are of course the 'pigs' of the title, for they truly behave like pigs toward the Japanese.... But the pigs are also these Japanese yakuza themselves, since not only do the Americans abuse them and treat them as something less than human beings, but they themselves have been tempted by the greed and the example set by the occupiers. If the Americans are amoral, their petty yakuza imitators who would live off the leavings of their profligate wealth are equally so."