Ichi the Killer, the ultra-controversial new film based on the Japanese manga gangster cartoon strip, has been passed by the censor but only after 11 cuts.

In all, 3 minutes have been sliced out of Takashi Miike's film, the biggest cut from an 18-rated film in almost a decade, although much of its extreme, vein-spurting violence remains intact.

Miike earned a reputation as a director who pushes the limits of acceptability with his first cult hit Audition, reviled by many for its alleged misogyny but loved by others who describe him as the "Dante of the lower depths". But the censor rejected scenes in Ichi the Killer where naked women are sexually mutilated and killed.

Although censor Robin Duval acknowledged that the film belonged to a long tradition of Japanese cinematic fantasy violence, he ruled that the offending scenes "contain images of erotically explicit violence which have never been passed by the British Board of Film Classification".

In its statement, the board said its guidelines specifically outlawed scenes which "eroticise or appear to endorse sexual violence... or which are designed to titillate". It said research had shown they could cause harm to some viewers.

In the film Ichi is caught in a war between two rival yakuza gangs. The board felt the "damage perpetrated by male gangsters was unlikely to inspire emulation" but the violence against female characters "appear to have no function other than the pleasure of the onlooker".

Last night Medusa Communications, the film's distributor, said it would not appeal.