Shogun’s Sadism opened in 1976. The Japanese title is 徳川女刑罰絵巻 牛裂きの刑, romanized Tokugawa onna keibatsu-emaki: Ushi-zaki no kei. It was also released as The Joy of Torture 2: Oxen Split Torturing. The film is a historical pink-horror spectacle inside Japanese splatter cinema, set in the Edo period. The sell is period costume, judicial cruelty, and punishment shot as erotic. It was made for the softcore and extreme-exploitation market. It is not an ethics text, and it is not a manual, for lifestyle BDSM.
It follows the 1968 film Shogun’s Joy of Torture and pushes the Tokugawa-era “woman punishment” brand further. Rope, blades, and public torment are packaged as genre entertainment. The story is two lines wound together. One follows a Christian girl taken into slavery and records a long torture. Faith, captivity, and bodily pain are staged as an Edo spectacle. The other follows a brothel master who wants to flee with a girl he loves. Sex work, the fantasy of escape, and punitive violence sit in the same cruel world.
The film holds itself together under the brand “Tokugawa woman-punishment picture scroll.” The Japanese title advertises ox-splitting as the signature horror. That ox-splitting is a historical torture scene inside a movie. It is not something a viewer can copy. The people on screen are fictional period characters. They are not adults today who have negotiated a rope scene.
