May 10, 2009

Unchain 「アンチェイン」 - Toshiaki Toyoda - 2000




There once was a boxer called "Unchain Kaji" . His ring name "Unchain" came from Ray Charles' classic tune Unchain My Heart.---"Unchain the heart !" Kaji lived his life like the song. But as a professional boxer, he recorded six losses and drew. He didn't even win once.
After he retired, Kaji started a business in Osaka's day laborers' town Kamagasaki and named it "tonchi (Wit)Trading Company." Though mainly a labor shark for day workers, he did bits of private investigating and searched for lost pet animals too--he did anything short of murder. But the business did not go well. Fueled by heavy drinking and the aftereffects of a boxing injury, Kaji's crazy behavior goes to the extreme.
May 5 , 1995. The office phone of Tonchi Trading Company rings over and over. It's a day laborer who threatens and demands his pay. Kaji , furious , pours yellow paint over his own head, sits in the open window of a speeding taxi, and raid Airin Center, the job center in Kamagasaki. It was a solitary uprising. Armed with a wrench and hammer, he cries, " Get to work, you bastards!! Quit pissing in the street, bum!! "
Before his attack, Kaji had called up three boxers. Garuda Tetsu. Nagaisi Osamu, and Nishibayashi Seiichirou, all boxers of various styles but all united through a bond of friendship.
Through ring-side footage, interviews, and insightful episodes, Unchain reveals the unleashing of their souls.

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