Ichi Razortoes
June 5th, 2006 by Andre Soares
Via the BBC: The British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) has ordered more than three minutes cut from Koroshiya 1 / Ichi the Killer, a Japanese film that depicts graphic scenes of "extreme sexual violence." That represents the BBFC’s biggest demand for an "editing job" in about a decade.
Described by its distributor, Medusa Pictures, as an "ultra-controversial piece of manga mayhem," Ichi the Killer includes scenes of naked women being sexually mutilated, beaten, and killed. "These scenes," stated the BBFC, "appear to the board to have no function other than the pleasure of the onlooker." When the film was shown at the 2001 Toronto Film Festival, organizers provided sick bags to the audience.
Directed by Takashi Miike (Ôdishon / Audition), Ichi the Killer is based on Hideo Yamamoto’s manga comic in which a bloodthirsty hitman meets his match in the person of Ichi, a man with razor blades in place of toes.
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2 Responses to “Ichi Razortoes”
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I don’t think that most westerners are aware of the extreme violence that saturates the world of Japanese comics and animation. A large portion of it is as far away from Pokemon and Sailor Moon as it gets. Even cartoons which seen cutesy like the before mentioned Sailor Moon have elements that would unnerve a western audience. I know this as a reader of graphic novels that comic books read by little Japanese girls often have gay men in the which is perfectly innocuous to the girls of Japan. But that’s nothing. Comics aimed at men and teenage boys give a disturbing glimpse in the sexual repression of Japan and the misogyny is nauseating. Decapitation, sex with monsters and demons, and other sexual elements are horrifying to us but part of the anime culture. During her Drowned World tour Madonna, fascinated with Japan at the time, feautred a animated anime sequence of a demon having sex with a women or more accurately raping her while she played the anti sexist anthem What It Feels Like For a Girl. But manga gets more and more strange and really gives viewers as look into the repression that permeates the culture. Rape fantasies and violence against women are nothing uncommon. The pornography laws have a lot to do with the way that sex is portray in their films as well as the culture itself which is something to be studied.
I wanted to add that the image of the female in misogynistic or sexist Japanese Animation is similar to the image of the female in American pornography wasp waisted, busty, long legged, and easily available to any and every man that has trickled over into pop culture with women like Jenna Jameson, Pamela Anderson and Anna Nicole Smith. As I thought I wondered in the violence against the women in Japanese animation has anything to do with the unrealistic or should I say altered images of the female form in the media. Women in Japanese animation rarely look Japanese so I wonder if there is some underlying or subconscious rage against American beauty standards imported into Japan? Or perhaps I am overthinking this but I wonder?