Shogun’s Sadism (Japanese: 徳川女刑罰絵巻 牛裂きの刑, Tokugawa onna keibatsu-emaki: Ushi-zaki no kei; also released as The Joy of Torture 2: Oxen Split Torturing) is a 1976 Japanese splatter film—historical pink-horror spectacle set in Edo-period Japan. It packages period costume, judicial cruelty, and eroticized punishment for the softcore and extreme-exploitation circuit rather than for any lifestyle BDSM ethics. The film functions as a follow-up to the 1968 title Shogun’s Joy of Torture, extending that franchise’s brand of Tokugawa-era “woman punishment” imagery into another round of rope, blades, and public torment sold as genre entertainment.
Two Linked Stories of Period Torture
The narrative tells two interwoven stories. One follows a Christian girl taken into slavery and subjected to prolonged torture—faith, captivity, and bodily suffering framed as Edo spectacle. The other follows a brothel master who tries to escape with a girl he has fallen in love with, folding the sex-work economy, flight fantasy, and punitive violence into the same cruel world. Both strands lean on the marketing of a “Tokugawa woman-punishment picture scroll”: branding, restraint, and the infamous ox-splitting torture that the Japanese title advertises as the film’s signature horror.
