Well aware of the fact that men and women could see each other unclothed at public baths and hot springs without restrictions at any given time, they had to add graphic erotic excitement. Not that this makes shunga mundane or apolitical. As we have seen already with the parody of the women’s textbook, the physicality and bookishness of shunga made it an appropriate genre for satire. The Greek and Roman examples of erotica that do show mortals present themselves as snapshots of nameless flirting or decontextualised rutting: man with woman, man with man, or, on an oil-lamp made in Athens under the Roman Empire, woman and horse. Shunga’s equivalents, on the other hand, which in the 17th and 18th centuries also embraced male-male sex between older, active men and youths, have their origins in the narrative traditions of the Medieval period and the luxury handscrolls of the elite. By far the majority of shunga depict the sexual relations of the ordinary people, the chōnin, the townsmen, women, merchant class, artisans and farmers. Occasionally there also appear Dutch or Portuguese foreigners. [1] Since it is our mission to give shunga art a bigger stage, it would be really great if you would join us and share this eBook with your friends and acquaintances! Because the more members, the stronger our movement becomes…!! Review

Men with the means to afford it often had concubines aside from their wives, and young folks fell in love and ran away with the maid they met in the hostel where they stayed – Japanese literature is awash with such stories. Eishi Chobunsai: Contest of Passion in the Four Seasons (1789-1801) Shunga Styles and Content Shunga couples are often shown in nonrealistic positions with exaggerated genitalia. Explanations for this include increased visibility of the sexually explicit content, artistic interest and psychological impact: that is, the genitalia are interpreted as a "second face", expressing the primal passions that the everyday face is obligated by giri to conceal, and are therefore the same size as the head and placed unnaturally close to it by the awkward positioning. [1] See also [ edit ]Shunga were produced by the same artists who also worked in other fields of ukiyo-e. Some of the most famous shunga were drawn for example by Hokusai when he took a break from studying Mount Fuji from all its angles. Similarly, boys of the Wakashū age range were considered erotically attractive and often performed the female parts in kabuki productions. Many of them worked as gigolos. These carried the same fetish of the sex worker, with the added quality of often being quite young. They are often depicted with samurai, since wakashū and older samurai often formed couples with the elder acting as a mentor for the younger. 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.

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. 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. When Japan opened towards the West during the Meiji Restoration (in the late 1860s) Westerners were often given shunga as presents. While the Japanese considered shunga treasured gifts, many Westerners rejected them. They were puritans of the Victorian age, after all. 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.

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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.

Though heterosexual marriage was the expectation during the Edo period, same-sex relations were not explicitly prohibited by Shintoism or Buddhism, the dominant religions of the era, or by Tokugawa law. This was particularly the case for sex and romance between men, which assumed myriad different forms dictated by social factors including class, profession and age. 21 See Chalmers, note 8, ‘Sexual liaisons commonly occurred between priests and their young lovers (chigo/wakashu), samurai (nenja) and youths (chigo), and male kabuki actors or male prostitutes (kagema) and their patrons. Moreover, within this period male sexual relations were not exclusively homosexual but part of broader bisexual practices’, in Sharon Chalmers, ‘Tolerance, form and female disease: the pathologisation of lesbian sexuality in Japanese society’, Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context, issue 6, August 2001. The concept of shūdō (male love; to ‘lay down one’s life’) was a central principle of Edo’s samurai culture, and sex and romance between men is a common subject celebrated in both shunga and historical Japanese literature. 22 See eighteenth-century samurai manual Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure (Book of the Samurai). As Leupp explains: But within the given social structure, a lot of things were relatively easy-going. Prostitution districts existed in every town, Tokyo’s Yoshiwara being the most famous but not the only one by far. In fact, prostitution took place at many bath houses / hot springs as well as at the tea houses (which were in fact often run as part of the bath houses). For the hard-working day laborer, paid sex was certainly within reach. 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.Miyagawa Isshō, c. 1750; Shunga hand scroll (kakemono-e); sumi, color and gofun on silk. Private collection. 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] In large part, Edo society was divided between public and private spheres and Shogun-dictated obligations meant that men and women were often separated for extended periods. A prevailing interpretation of these sexual implements seems to be that, sequestered away to inner chambers and rendered abstinent by circumstance, women had little option but to engage in self or mutual pleasuring, and were even encouraged to do so for health benefits. A curatorial note accompanying a shunga album in the British Museum offers the following explanation for the depiction of harigata: Edited by: Timothy Clark, C.Andrew Gerstle, Aki Ishigami, Akiko Yano. Timothy Clark is Head of the Japanese Section in the Department of Asia at the British Museum, London. C. Andrew Gerstle is Head of the Department of Japan and Korea and Professor of Japanese studies at SOAS, University of London. Aki Ishigami is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Kinugasa Research Organization, Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto. Akiko Yano is Leverhulme Research Fellow in the Department of Japan and Korea at SOAS, University of London. a b c d e f g h i j k l m n Kielletyt kuvat: Vanhaa eroottista taidetta Japanista / Förbjudna bilder: Gammal erotisk konst från Japan / Forbidden Images: Erotic art from Japan's Edo period (in Finnish, Swedish, and English). Helsinki, Finland: Helsinki City Art Museum. 2002. pp.23–28. ISBN 951-8965-53-6.