What Miike's Crows movies do is allow him, once again, to play in that space. In Ichi, these other characters play specifically on that fray in order to instrumentalize him. That said, what does organize the way in which the images are presented on the screen over time in Ichi the Killer is motivated, at least in part, by the way it develops the titular character's very, uhm, fraught, relationship to masculinity, and specifically to the forms of masculinity pressed upon him by the other characters. Welcome to 2014 in Shit, in which I take myself to film school for your edification and my embarrassment. Which isn't necessarily bad, you know, but kind of ruins the fun of an exercise like this. Which is to say that focusing on content to the exclusion of form is a way of reducing films to a set of meanings, which is itself a means of turning any individual film into a data point. It's something of a copout to say, "well, really, this horror film, what it is actually about is masculinity," in part because this obscures the fact that it (no matter what it is, but especially Ichi) is much more about composing images within a developing abstract framework that produce affective responses.
This is in the reading of Ichi as a movie about masculinity, which maybe (I haven't seen it in going on ten years probably) isn't immediately obvious. Maybe Visitor Q, although that has too broad of a scope. Some words on those movies, to give context on the one under consideration but also because fucking Miike is such a piece of shit and he's the best in spite of what I just said, if there's any movie of his that the Crows films are closest to thematically I'd have to reach for Ichi the Killer. I don't think either of Miike's Crows ever quite achieve the brilliance of the DoA movies, but they aren't incredibly far off. They were also both directed by Takashi Miike, closer to his Dead or Alive style than, say, his Ichi or Audition or Gozu styles. They both fucking ruled I watched them in preparation for the third, having never heard of them before. The first two - Crows Zero and Crows Zero 2 - were live action adaptations of a high school yakuza-adjacent fighting manga. Crows : Explode is the third in a series.