This rare and disturbing tatekan format promo was made for a movie titled Tokugawa onna keibatsu-emaki: Ushi-zaki no kei, known in English as The Joy of Torture 2: Oxen Split Torturing, or often Oxen Split Torturing, or sometimes merely Shogun’s Sadism. It falls into a category of Japanese cinema known as ero guro which combines elements of horror, sex, and general depravity. In essence, it’s a loose precursor to films like Saw, except of course, American torture films generally omit anything sexual, that being a bridge too far for those audiences. Not so in Japan. To set the mood, The Joy of Torture 2 even opens with credits atop documentary footage of various atrocities—up to and including incinerated victims of the Nagasaki nuclear bombing.
The narrative section of the movie is divided into two stories, one in the 1600s, and the second in the 1800s. In the first, a cruel Shogun is bored by the usual tortures, and demands new and horrifying methods that he can really enjoy as they’re applied to his shogunate’s pesky Christians, who he’s trying to make renounce their religion. We’d be remiss if we didn’t give you a close look at this insane character played by Akira Shioji. Hold on to your eyeballs:
Shioji was adept portraying weirdos, but he was capable of being normal too. Hard to believe, we know. Anyway, when a beautiful woman played by Rena Uchimura is stolen from her lover and whisked away to the Shogun’s palace, she’s put through the wringer in multiple all-too-predictable ways meant to break her spirit—if not her body. This section is exemplified by the line: “You’ll soon forget your god and cling to me like a bitch!” Rappers, that translation is our gift to you. Run with it.
Eventually Uchimura’s little sister Mitsu is brought to the palace for leverage. In American movies children are rarely exposed to serious harm. You get no such assurances in Japanese cinema. The Shogun gleefully beats the kid, stomps her head a few times, then has her eyes burned out with a hot poker. Saw never even contemplated such degeneracy. You’re thinking right now, “Who in the everloving fuck would want to watch this?” Well, as far as we know, millions of Japanese cinemagoers. The plot continues, but we’ll stop there. Wouldn’t want to spoil anything for you.
In part two of the film— Well, does it really matter? As in the first segment, this section is defined by gender violence as a man working in a brothel to pay off his debts observes the cruel treatment there, and tries to escape with one of the women. There’s no sense of deeper meaning, at least that we could discern, therefore there’s no sense in watching the movie, in our opinion. Obviously, the title tells you there was an earlier film with the same framework, and insofar as we’re willing to rank the two on a scale, the first is better—but not much. Tokugawa onna keibatsu-emaki: Ushi-zaki no kei premiered in Japan today in 1976.
