Shunga: Erotic Art in Japan

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From the 1970’s on, shunga could be published again in Japanese books but the genitals had to be covered by fog spots – just as in pink movies. Japanese sex museums ( hihokan) displayed some original shunga for adults only. Even there, fog spots were in place.

That nudity as such was nothing that would arouse much interest in Edo Japan also led the woodcarvers to dress the protagonists in their pictures in dramatically arranged kimonos during their sex acts. Elaborate dressing revealing nothing but the center of the action was their way of presentation.

Shunga – Erotic Pictures from the Floating World 春画

Lesser known is that the ukiyo-e concept of covering almost all aspects of contemporary life included both the real and the artistically imagined sex life of Edo Japan. Those pictures are known under the name shunga (which translates to “Spring Pictures”). Erotic Japanese art was heavily suppressed in Japan from the 1870s onwards as part of a process of cultural ‘modernisation’ that imported many contemporary western moral values. Only in the last twenty years or so has it been possible to publish unexpurgated examples in Japan and this ground-breaking publication presents this fascinating art in its historical and cultural context for the first time. Shunga were produced between the sixteenth century and the nineteenth century by ukiyo-e artists, since they sold more easily and at a higher price than their ordinary work. Shunga prints were produced and sold either as single sheets or—more frequently—in book form, called enpon. These customarily contained twelve images, a tradition with its roots in Chinese shunkyu higa. Shunga was also produced in hand scroll format, called kakemono-e (掛け物絵). This format was also popular, though more expensive as the scrolls had to be individually painted. In the same year Utamaro also produced the most famous shunga album in the history of Japanese art the ‘ Poem of the Pillow (Utamakura)‘. It is outstanding for its technical brilliance of the engraving and the extraordinary quality of the colours. It exposes his greatness as an artist, portraying a mixture of subjects (such as the Dutch couple) and settings, all of them taking an unprecedented level and degree of intensity, the capacity to express passionate feelings and the conception of the human figure, particularly that of the female body. Tenderness

The wood print artists were fascinated by the romantic and sexual aspects of life just as the writers were. Both bent and exaggerated the topics they depicted in their own way.Shunga, as a subset of ukiyo-e, was enjoyed by all social groups in the Edo period, despite being out of favor with the shogunate. The ukiyo-e movement sought to idealize contemporary urban living and appeal to the new chōnin class. Shunga followed the aesthetics of everyday life and widely varied in its depictions of sexuality. Most ukiyo-e artists made shunga at some point in their careers. Where ‘ dan’ and ‘ nanshoku’ mean ‘male love’; that is, between men, ‘ joshoku’ (‘female love’) might be misinterpreted to mean the corresponding term for women. In reality, however, the term refers to the attraction of men to women. Within this male-centric rubric, no fixed term encompassing romantic love, or sex, between women existed in Japan until the 1910s when the term d ō seiai (same-sex love) first appeared. As Peichen Wu asserts, it was not until the existence of this term that discourse around the subject could emerge in any formal sense, or that lesbianism (or bisexuality) could be formally recognised as a legitimate category of sexuality and sexual identity in Japan. 23 Women’s Sexualities and Masculinities in a Globalizing Asia, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2007, p. 80. The publication of newsletter Subarashi Onna (Wonderful Women) in 1975, and book Onna wo ai suru onnatachi no monogatari (Stories of women who love women) in 1987 are often referred to as the first first-person accounts of female relationships in Japan – a century and a half later than the NGV’s scroll and some two centuries later than early examples of female sex in shunga. The majority of the shunga available today is however of the more expensive private collector variety. Those were prized items worth keeping while hardly anybody cared about preserving the day-by-day book lender offerings. Fortunately, some have survived nonetheless. Censored shunga published in 1979 Censorship Please note: Throughout this essay, names prior to the end of the Edo period (1868) are noted by family name followed by given name. Names from the beginning of the Meiji period (1868 to present) are noted by given name followed by family name.

Both painted handscrolls and illustrated erotic books (empon) often presented an unrelated sequence of sexual tableaux, rather than a structured narrative. A whole variety of possibilities are shown—men seduce women, women seduce men; men and women cheat on each other; all ages from virginal teenagers to old married couples; even octopuses were occasionally featured. [1] Shunga were both sold as rather expensive scrolls as well as in the form of books. The latter typically allowed for a greater variety of genres. Though long scrolls could certainly tell exciting stories, it was books that were able to reprint classic novels like, say, the Tale of Genji, but illustrate them with erotic images. For me, a classicist who has recently written on erotic artefacts from ancient Greece and Rome, and the reception of these artefacts in the Renaissance and beyond, shunga is certainly strange. Approach a Greco-Roman statue such as the 4th-century BC Aphrodite of Knidos, and one’s appreciation of what it is that makes her the dynamic embodiment of the goddess of sexual desire on earth is shaped by centuries of artistic appreciation that has put the female nude on a pedestal and ‘got off’ on toppling her from it. The Pan and Goat sculpture may still worry its London public, but it has been doing so since its rediscovery in the 18th century when the difficulties of seeing it ‘in the flesh’ made it something of a celebrity. Sexy and sexually explicit imagery has always had a part in our engagement with the antique. By contrast, Japanese art is a non-naturalistic tradition with no such investment in the nude form, male or female. It occupies an altogether different place in the Western imagination. Although shunga arrived in Britain in 1613 (acquired by the captain of the first English voyage to Japan, John Saris, in exchange for erotic paintings born of the classical tradition), it was burned before it could leave the East India Company’s offices. It was not until the mid 19th century that it infiltrated the studies of England’s educated elite. Earlier collectors such as Horace Walpole (1717–97) had to make do with cabinets and ceramics.You could also help us a lot by letting us know what you think of the eBook by placing a reaction below. If you’d prefer to remain anonymous you can also add only your initials to the comment..!! This essay has created an intertext of a different kind, that between the classical world and Japanese society of 1600–1900, to have us think harder about what we are looking at when we look at erotic artworks from different cultures. Following the Meiji Restoration of 1868, the publication and display of shunga in Japan was strictly forbidden and real bodies controlled by regulations concerning tattoos, mixed bathing and public nakedness. In the wake of the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–05, these strictures became more severe, as though the need to play on an international stage infected Japan with the kinds of moral codes that had corseted Victorian Britain. For most of the 20th century it was nigh on impossible for scholars to study or disseminate shunga: even academic journals published in Japan in the 1960s had to obfuscate the genitals. Although shunga is clearly rooted in the visual culture of China, factors such as China’s Cultural Revolution still make the later history of its erotic imagery difficult. As diverse as the variety of people depicted, as various was the variety of the sex acts themselves. Heterosexual encounters in all imaginable forms formed the bulk of the pictures. Gay and lesbian encounters were however also present as well as rather fantastic trysts. While most shunga were heterosexual, many depicted male-on-male trysts. Woman-on-woman images were less common but there are extant works depicting this. [10] Masturbation was also depicted. The perception of sexuality differed in Tokugawa Japan from that in the modern Western world, and people were less likely to associate with one particular sexual preference. For this reason the many sexual pairings depicted were a matter of providing as much variety as possible. [1] a b c d e f Screech, Timon (1999). Sex and the Floating World. London: Reaktion Books. pp.13–35. ISBN 1-86189-030-3.