Vintage poster for Jitsuroku onna kanbetsusho: sei-jigoku, aka True Story of a Woman Condemned: Sex Hell, directed by Koyu Ohara and starring Hitomi Kozue. It premiered in Japan today in 1975. 

Maybe the English word “sex” is to the Japanese what the French word “soirée” is to English speakers—i.e., a foreign word that carries more meaning than its indigenous equivalent. Maybe “sex” sounds really dirty to Japanese ears. Maybe it’s just conveniently short. We don’t know the answer, but below are six one-sheets using that magical English syllable. However you say it, just do it. 

Promo poster of Japanese actress Meiko Kaji, star of the seminal pinku sword opera Lady Snowblood, pictured here circa 1973. 

Two posters for Furyô banchô yarazu buttakuri, aka Wolves of the City: Rip-Off Game, starring Tatsuo Umemiya, 1971.     

Above is a poster for Sukeban: kyoku totsuki asobi, aka Girl Boss: Crazy Ball Game, seventh in a series of Girl Boss movies. Earlier films featured Reiko Ike and Miki Sugimoto, but this entry stars lovely Yuko Kano as—stop us if you’ve heard this one before—a gang leader who takes on the local yakuza. Like the earlier Girl Bosses, it’s got plenty of girl fights and nudity, as well as (bonus) a pretty cool speedboat chase. True, we’ve seen better movies, but we’ve also seen a lot worse. Sukeban: kyoku totsuki asobi premiered in Japan in January of 1974. 

Are you getting a sense of déjà vu? Well, you’re not crazy. This does have an identical bondage theme and color palette as a poster we shared last week. The main difference is that this victim has shaved her armpits, which is good, because you always want to look your best for a torturing. The film here is Kifujin shibari tsubo, aka Noble Lady Bound Vase, and it stars Naomi Tani, who we’re going to get know real well on this site. She was Japan’s queen of bondage cinema, garnering notoriety for her roles in flicks like Wife To Be Sacrificed and Colorful Bed of Violent Desire, before retiring to become a restaurant owner. As we mentioned before, though we like pinku films, harder ones are not exactly our cup of T&A. We do realize that rope bondage is considered fine art in Japan, but as Americans—even ones who have spent years abroad—we can’t completely shake a lifetime of conditioning that makes us see something weird here. But on the other hand, we seriously doubt the Japanese can understand why we glorify violence to such an extent in American cinema. So we won’t judge them if they don’t judge us. One of the reasons we started this site was to explore how art varies from culture to culture, and so of course we’ll keep discussing these films, but we’ll also be looking seriously into the Japanese bondage arts kinbaku-bi and shibari. Hope you’re looking forward to that. Now we have to go shoot some people. Kifujin shibari tsubo opened in Japan today in 1977.

Hana to hebi: kyûkyoku nawa chôkyô was released with the English title Flower and Snake 4: Rope Magic, which is a very pretty collection of nouns for an exercise in torture porn. Fairly hard torture porn, too, probably because by the time this was made by Nikkatsu Studios, adult video was taking a major bite out of Japan’s pinku market. The plot here is simple: a gambler with debts loses his wife and daughter to the Yakuza, who proceed to humiliate the women in various fiendish ways. There’s an escape attempt that goes awry, but basically the story is just a framework for increasingly devilish forms of sexual degradation. You got your dildos. You got your hot wax. You got your urine. This is soooo not our thing. But what is our thing is the promo art, which is just lovely, even while evincing the film’s highly dubious nature. Experienced pinku fans, or those into the Japanese art of Kinbaku-bi (beautiful bondage) may dig this movie. All others proceed with caution. Hana to hebi: kyûkyoku nawa chôkyô, premiered in Japan today in 1987.     

Here’s a lovely poster from the early 1970s for a film starring little known pinku actress Michiyo Mako. As far as we know this film never had a Western release, so without an official English title we have to make one up. We see Kanji symbols for “characteristic,” “banquet,” “human,” and “wife.” The fifth figure, in the middle, eluded us for what seemed like forever until we figured out it was a 5. So we’ll title this film “Banquet for Five Wives.” Or maybe we should title it "Banquet of Five Wives." It's always important to distinguish who's doing the cooking and who's doing the eating.

If you’ve been visiting Pulp Intl. regularly, you know we feature promo art from Japanese pinku films. The above poster is for Onna kyôshi, aka School Mistress, aka Woman Teacher, which isn’t technically a pinku flick, but instead falls into a parallel category known as roman porno. The term has nothing to do with ancient Rome—it’s actually just a mash-up of “romantic” and “pornography.” The main difference between the roman porno and pinku styles is that the former was the creation of Japan’s oldest movie studio Nikkatsu, and the films they produced had a higher budget and were often less violent than the pinku productions pioneered by studios like World Eiga and Nihon Cinema. However roman porno isn’t anything like American-style porn. Instead these are artful productions made for mainstream audiences and lack explicit visuals due to Japanese censorship laws. To suggest sexual action the moviemakers developed clever techniques such as interposing vases of flowers and other phallic objects between the viewer and the action. In fact, many film experts believe circumventing the censors is what gave roman porno films their defining characteristics. We have about a hundred more of these pinku/roman porno posters, few of which, to our knowledge, have ever been seen on the Internet. We’ll be sharing them in the future. Onna kyôshi opened in Japan today in 1977.      

This one-sheet for Zenka onna: koroshi-bushi, aka Criminal Woman: Killing Melody is one of the more common pinku images on the internet and, for that reason, we weren’t going to post it. But then we decided to do it anyway because, with only one exception, every site we saw had this piece reversed. Yeah, we know—those Japanese characters look the same backward and forward. Unless of course you happen to read Japanese. So for the record, the poster is correctly oriented the way we have it above. As for the movie, well you’ve got Reiko Ike, action, gore, sexploitation, prison, and co-star Miki Sugimoto, all in a fast-paced, straightforward revenge flick. It isn’t quite tops, but even mediocre pinku is good pinku in our book. Zenka onna: koroshi-bushi opened in Japan today in 1973.