Miike Takashi is a highly prolific and controversial Japanese filmmaker. He has directed over ninety theatrical, video, and television productions since his debut in 1991. Miike is credited with directing fifteen productions in the years 2001 and 2002 alone. His films range from violent and bizarre to dramatic and family-friendly. Miike was born to Korean parents in Yao, Osaka, Japan, an area inhabited by poor working-class immigrants from the Korean Peninsula. His family originally emigrated to Kumamoto Prefecture. During World War II, his grandfather was stationed in China and Korea, and his father was born in Seoul in today's South Korea. His father worked as a welder and his mother was a seamstress. Although he claimed to have attended classes only rarely, he graduated from Yokohama Vocational School of Broadcast and Film (Yokohama Hōsō Eiga Senmon Gakko) under the guidance of a renowned filmmaker Shohei Imamura, the founder and Dean of that institution. One of his most controversial films was the ultra-violent Ichi the Killer (2001), adapted from a manga of the same name and starring Tadanobu Asano as a sadomasochistic yakuza enforcer. The extreme violence was initially exploited to promote the film: during its international premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2001, the audience received "barf bags" emblazoned with the film's logo as a promotional gimmick (one typically flamboyant gory killing involves a character slicing a man in half from head to groin, and severing another's face, which then slides down a nearby wall). However, the British Board of Film Classification refused to allow the release of the film uncut in Britain, citing its extreme levels of sexual violence towards women. In Hong Kong, 15 minutes of footage were cut. In the United States, it has been shown uncut (unrated). An uncut DVD was also released in the Benelux. In 2005, Miike was invited to direct an episode of the Watch drama online for free.