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. Courtesans also form the subject of many shunga. Utamaro was particularly revered for his depictions of courtesans, which offered an unmatched level of sensitivity and psychological nuance. Tokugawa courtesans could be described as the celebrities of their day, and Edo's pleasure district, Yoshiwara, is often compared to Hollywood. [8] Men saw them as highly eroticised due to their profession, but at the same time unattainable, since only the wealthiest, most cultured men would have any chance of sexual relations with one. Women saw them as distant, glamorous idols, and the fashions for the whole of Japan were inspired by the fashions of the courtesan. For these reasons, the fetish of the courtesan appealed to many. [4] 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

The generous vocabulary of terms relating to male-male sex in early modern Japanese reflects a society at ease with the phenomenon. Anyone perusing the abundant primary and secondary sources will encounter numerous allusions to the “male eros” (nanshoku); “the way of youths” (wakashūdō, often abbreviated as jakudō or shudō); the “way of men” ( nandō); “the beautiful way” ( bidō); and the “secret way” ( hidō). All these are euphemisms for male-male sex, conforming to certain specific conventions’. Shunga varied greatly in quality and price. Some were highly elaborate, commissioned by wealthy merchants and daimyōs, while some were limited in colour, widely available, and cheap. [1] Empon were available through the lending libraries, or kashi-honya, that travelled in rural areas. This tells us that shunga reached all classes of society—peasant, chōnin, samurai and daimyōs. 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 Realistic paintings of life in Japan were actually made long before the Edo era, but it was in the Edo Period that the technique of wood printing came to full fore.

In early modern Japan, 1600–1900, thousands of sexually explicit paintings, prints, and illustrated books with texts were produced, known as ‘spring pictures’ (shunga). Frequently tender, funny and beautiful, shunga were mostly produced within the popular school known as ‘pictures of the floating world’ (ukiyo-e), by celebrated artists such as Utamaro and Hokusai. Early modern Japan was certainly not a sex-paradise; however, the values promoted in shunga are generally positive towards sexual pleasure for all. Official life in this period was governed by strict Confucian laws, but private life was less controlled in practice. 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. 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. On the other hand, no artists are known today who produced only shunga. Shunga were not the work of specialized pornographers. Sex was considered a natural part of life in Edo Japan and the production of erotic images reflected this point of view. Katsushika Hokusai: Gods of Myriad Conjugal Delights (1821) Sex in Edo Times

Furthermore, you will discover the first known shunga master, and more about his great pupil. The similarity between Sugimura Jihei and the Dutch Baroque painter Johannes Vermeer. Answers to the questions about who was the first Japanese artist to depict exaggerated genitals and who was the greatest ukiyo-e artist from the Kyoto area. And who was the biggest networker? This and much more… Join Our Mission Fig.3. ‘ Festival mask‘ (c.1805) from the series ‘ Ehon takara gura (Treasure Room of Love)‘ by Kitagawa UtamaroFor 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. The Kyōhō Reforms, a 1722 edict, was much more strict, banning the production of all new books unless the city commissioner gave permission. After this edict, shunga went underground. However, since for several decades following this edict, publishing guilds saw fit to send their members repeated reminders not to sell erotica, it seems probable that production and sales continued to flourish. [3] Further attempts to prevent the production of shunga were made with the Kansei Reforms under Emperor Kōkaku in the 1790s. [4] [ failed verification] 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] Shunga did find fans in the West, however. Artists such as Auguste Rodin, Aubrey Beardsley, and Pablo Picasso are known to have been inspired by Japanese erotic prints.

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. 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”). But printing also meant that the images could be replicated in large numbers, they could be mass-produced. Utamaro Kitagawa: Poem of the Pillow (1788)Though scarce, references to desire between women in pre-modern Japan do exist beyond shunga representations. While virtually no mention of female relationships has been identified in public, formal records, an examination of historical literature and private accounts supports much earlier examples, including those away from the fictional male gaze. Murasaki Shikibu (c. 973 or 978 – c. 1014 or 1031) was the author of what is widely considered to be Japan’s first novel, The Tale of Genji. A collection of poems and fictionalised accounts of romantic encounters within Japan’s Heian imperial court, the book is centred around the escapades of the fictional prince Genji. A woman of the Heian court during her own lifetime, Murasaki is celebrated for her refined skills in kana, a cursive calligraphic script developed by women and distinguishing Japanese emotions and literature from those written in Chinese scripts used by Japanese men of the era. So subtle are Murasaki’s romantic references, and so imbued with the cultural nuances of the period, many scholars still disagree about the exact meaning or atmosphere of certain scenes, and multiple conflicting English translations abound. There is little dispute surrounding a scene where the titular prince Genji beds the younger brother of his love interest, but in Murasaki’s own diaries, she reflects on her attraction to, and exchange of love poems with, other women in the court. 24 Murasaki, in Wieringa, p. 33. According to Lisa Dalby, The Tale of Genji began as a game of sexual role play between Murasaki and a female friend. 25 Dalby, in Wieringa, p. 33. Literary historian and one of Japan’s first lesbian feminists, Kimi Komashaku supports this interpretation. 26 Komashakyu (1998), in Wieringa p. 33. Sasama Yoshihiko suggests that sexual relationships occurred between women both in the shogun’s ‘seraglio’, and in instances between ‘people who despised liaisons with men.’ 27 Sasama, in Leupp p. 189. A section reserved for ‘lesbian prostitution’ in Edo’s famed Yoshiwara pleasure district supported by multiple references in Tokugawa literature. 28 See Aso Isoji & Fuji Akio (eds), Taiyaku Saikaku zenshu, vol. 16: Saikaku zoku tsurezure Saikaku nagori no tomo, Meiji shoin, Tokyo, 1977, p. 31, p. 36, note 16; Gendaigo yaku Saikaku zenshu, vol. 11: Saikaku okimiyage Saikaku zoku tsurezure Saikaku nagori no tomo, Teruoka Yasutaka (trans.), Shogakukan, Tokyo, 1977, p. 142, all cited in Leupp, p. 189. In the 1686 novel The life of an Amorous Woman by Ihara Saikaku, a young domestic servant recounts her first night working for her new mistress who after a night of sex together declares ‘when I am reborn in the next world, I will be a man. Then I shall be free to do what really gives me pleasure!’. Though the young protagonist has never before encountered this situation in previous jobs, she reflects pragmatically that ‘the Floating World is wide’. 29 Ihara Saikaku, The Life of an Amorous Woman and Other Writings, Ivan Morris (trans.) New York, 1963, pp. 187–8. 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. 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.