Page 143 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

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the filmmakers, who have the fruits of their creative labours squashed
before they can even be sampled. As well, such censorship marks an
attack upon the circulation of knowledge and ideas tantamount to an
epistemological assassination.
Here, again, I turn to Tom Mes’ essay on Ichi the Killer, for his
reflections upon Miike’s film contain two important observations with
which I wish to engage critically. The first of these is his point that:

[Ichi the Killer] as a whole is a completely cohesive unity, in that all of its
parts are absolutely crucial to the functioning of the whole. Any attempt at
censoring or toning down the violence will have the opposite effect and will in
fact make the film more exploitative and thereby undermine its critical stance.
Excising scenes of violence, particularly the painful scenes, will harm the
symbiosis between the “playful” and the “painful” violence, which forms the
basis for Miike’s critical approach. (2003: 242-3)

Genre films have long provided directors with opportunities for
expressing political perspectives through allegory or through temporal or
spatial displacement. As Mes correctly notes, by excising a ‘“painfully”
violent’ sequence, like the extremely disturbing scene in which a woman
is tortured by having her nipples severed (though, ironically, spectators
viewing the un-cut version never actually see the severing), censors and
distributors that allow for such censorship compromise both the artist’s
vision and the politics that inform it. Ichi the Killer is indeed a very
violent film, but as Mes points out, violence and the experience of
viewing violence is very much part of Miike’s over-arching aesthetic and
critical agenda. Miike, in other words, wants viewers to ‘think’ carefully
about what they are watching. He wants them to contemplate both
violence’s potentially traumatic consequences, as well as their own roles
as consumers of brutal images (243). Editing out ‘“painful” violence’
while keeping only the more cartoonish, ‘“playful” violence’ intact
constitutes an act of irresponsible excision that, ultimately, has an effect
opposite to that intended by the censors. Rather than ‘protecting’
audiences, such censorship rejects the concept of violence as a social
issue worthy of consideration through artistic means and, consequently,
reduces the representation and consumption of images depicting the
willful infliction of physical abuse upon others to only ‘playful’ scenes