Was Ninja Scroll Censored?

Ninja Scroll was released uncut in Japan and in the United States. The censorship story is British, and it belongs to a specific era: the mid-1990s, when the BBFC was at its most cautious about Japanese animation and about ninja weapons in particular, and the British press had folded Manga Entertainment’s catalogue into a moral panic remembered as the anime nasties years.

For its 1995 British release, the BBFC required cuts of approximately 52 seconds (some references say 53), removing a scene of sexual violence and shots of throwing stars, the shuriken imagery the Board then treated as imitable weaponry. Because home video masters travel, the cut spread: the British DVD carried it, and the Australian DVD was a direct copy of the British disc, even though Australia’s own censors had passed the film uncut.

Australia managed a twist of its own. The film was first rated MA15+; after an uncut screening on free-to-air television in 1996, the Federal Attorney-General applied for a review, and the classification was raised to R18+, a rating whose material cannot be shown on television. For years, an Australian could buy a cut R18+ DVD containing less of the film than an uncut MA15+ tape.

The footage came home in 2004, when the film was passed uncut for its tenth anniversary era release, and the tenth and twentieth anniversary editions that followed were likewise uncut at the same 18 certificate. Today every current edition, up to and including the 4K restoration, is the whole film. The scissors are part of its British biography, not its present.