It's even harder for old-school Japanese norms. What used to pass as mildly titillating in Japan is XXX porn in the US. And some of what's shocking there is easily child porn in the US. That's even so for some German naturalist stuff, and that was never even intended to be shocking.
For example, one of my favorite Miike films ("Visitor Q") begins with sex between a guy and his teenage daughter, who has been working as a prostitute to earn pocket money. And there's some necrophilia too. But it's all in good fun, you know.
I heard the genitalia censorship is a western influence, but I haven't found a really solid source. This is from a Cracked article:
>Despite what the censored porn might imply, nudity has never been taboo in Japanese culture. Not only were women used to walking around topless, but what we call porn was just another common genre of books, like cooking or travel. Japanese porn, or shunga, was a traditional form of visual media that had no stigma attached to it. Most artists created it without violating any type of social code. They were just making pictures of people fuckin'.
>It was only in the 19th century, when Western morality came to Japan, that the Japanese government decided to crack down on such traditional practices as public nudity, in order to make the case to the West that Japan was totally a civilized country. By the time World War II rolled around, Japanese porn had gone from an everyday part of Japanese culture to a demonized art form that, as the Pulitzer-winning expert John W. Dower noted, now inexplicably valued idealized Western versions of beauty, like long legs and big tits.
That was my understanding. Censorship got seriously going during the Meiji Restoration in 1868. And it got strengthened after Japan's surrender in WWII.
And it wasn't just sex that got censored. It became illegal to criticize the occupation government, object to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, complain about Japan's loss of the war, etc, etc.
As I understand it, that's what the 50s monster movies were about. The monsters were metaphors for the nuclear and firestorm attacks on civilian populations.
Those laws no longer exist. And so Miike gets into those issues in a few films. "Izo", for example, begins with an extended fast-motion contemplation of WWII, ending with the nuclear attacks. But "Izo" is more generally about the absurdity of nationalism, and how it's used by the powerful to control the masses. Indeed, it takes on all forms of authoritarianism, including religion.
So there's less censorship involving age or species, but pixilated genitalia. Go figure.
For example, in Miike's "Fudoh: The New Generation", there's a ~preteen assassin who uses a blow gun that's hidden in her vagina. There's one sequence where she's performing in a strip club, popping balloons (and hitting her target with a poisoned dart). And yes, the actress was 22 when the film was shot, but she looks a lot younger.
But not all genitalia. For example, there's the Kanamara Matsuri ("Festival of the Steel Phallus").[0] And some anime includes extremely detailed genitalia.
Takashi Miike reminds me a lot (in various ways) of Luis Buñuel, David Cronenberg, Jean-Luc Godard, David Lynch, Sam Peckinpah, and Quentin Tarantino. And (yes) Akira Kurosawa.
His 2010 "13 Assassins" is a true classic of the samurai genre. Clearly "Seven Samurai" level.
Linguistic and cultural imperialism are a thing. I don't know how to fight back. Those companies have a lot of money.