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 ]

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 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. 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. Illing, Richard (1978). Japanese Erotic Art and the Life of the Courtesan. London: Thames and Hudson. ISBN 978-0-500-53023-8. 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]Drawing on the latest scholarship from the leading experts in the field and featuring over 400 images of works from major public and private collections, this landmark book looks at painted and printed erotic images produced in Japan during the Edo period (1600–1868) and early Meiji era (1868–1912). These are related to the wider contexts of literature, theatre, the culture of the pleasure quarters, and urban consumerism; and interpreted in terms of their sensuality, reverence, humour and parody. 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. Shakespeare, Sebastian (25 October 2013). "Japanese erotica is unveiled 40 years on". London Evening Standard. p.17.

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] When two women were playing together [the harigata] was worn around the hips: when one woman was enjoying it alone, she tied it to her ankle. Here the woman wearing the dildo holds a shell-shaped container holding some kind of cream. [The inscription] says, ‘ Seeing as we’re going to do it like this, I’ll put lots of the cream on it. So really make yourself come. Without the cream this big one would not go in.’ … The other woman puts a hand up to the dildo and urges her friend, ‘ Hurry up and put it in. I want to come. I want to come five or six times without stopping’. This is not strictly speaking a lesbian encounter. In the Edo period it was widely believed that dildos were used by ladies-in-waiting in the women’s quarters of samurai mansions. They were necessary because this was a world without men, rather than being an expression of affective love between women. But were dildos really in widespread use among ladies-in-waiting in the Edo period? Surely this is, rather, ‘the world of the lady-in-waiting as imagined by common townspeople’. 9 The British Museum, Object: Fumi no kiyogaki 婦美の清書き (Neat Version of a Love Letter (or Pure Drawings of Female Beauty) (Neat Version of a Love Letter (or Pure Drawings of Female Beauty)), , date accessed 6 Mar. 2022. 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.Production [ edit ] The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife, Hokusai, 1814 A man with a Western-style haircut makes love to a woman in traditional Japanese dress in this Meiji-period shunga print.

The quality of shunga art varies, and few ukiyo-e painters remained aloof from the genre. Experienced artists found it to their advantage to concentrate on their production. This led to the appearance of shunga by renowned artists, such as the ukiyo-e painter perhaps best known in the Western world, Hokusai (see The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife from the series Kinoe no Komatsu). Ukiyo-e artists owed a stable livelihood to such customs, and producing a piece of shunga for a high-ranking client could bring them sufficient funds to live on for about six months. Among others, the world-famous Japanese artist Hajime Sorayama uses his special hand brush painting technique and hanko stamp signature method in the late 20th and early 21st centuries to create modern day shunga art in the same tradition of the past artists like Hokusai. 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] 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]

Miyagawa Isshō, c. 1750; Shunga hand scroll (kakemono-e); sumi, color and gofun on silk. Private collection. 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) Shunga: Sex and Pleasure in Japanese Art (Catalogue of the big shunga exhibition at the British Museum in London 2013) But if you look closer, a lot of the emotions depicted are not only shown via the sex acts themselves and the way dresses get rearranged through them but also in the faces, the fingers, and the hair of the people in the images.

The protagonists all appear to be enjoying themselves and there is little or no depiction of coercion. Katsushika Hokusai: The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife (1814) Though relevant within the broader context of audiences for female sex in shunga, these discussions offer little assistance in interpreting the Shunga scroll, which is unlike any other known example of sex between women. The work does not include any visible penetration, though it could be speculated that the furoshki-wrapped box next to the bed contains a harigata or related implement. Though there is no overt evidence of masculine presence, the protagonists are not alone. The blue bird peering forward from the screen behind them indicates an element of uninvited voyeurism, a frequently occurring theme in shunga (below). After 1722 most artists refrained from signing shunga works. However, between 1761 and 1786 the implementation of printing regulations became more relaxed, and many artists took to concealing their name as a feature of the picture (such as calligraphy on a fan held by a courtesan) or allusions in the work itself (such as Utamaro's empon entitled Utamakura). [1] Content [ edit ]

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Fig.3. ‘ Festival mask‘ (c.1805) from the series ‘ Ehon takara gura (Treasure Room of Love)‘ by Kitagawa Utamaro All of this makes the British Museum’s current exhibition particularly momentous. I feared that cabinet upon cabinet of sex and just sex would sully me and the material, but found instead that it augmented the beauty – the different ways in which the images play with seeing and not seeing, intimacy and voyeurism, delicacy and vulgarity, earnestness and humour. Compared to the Pompeii and Herculaneum exhibition, where Pan and the Goat’s relative isolation in the corner of a gallery otherwise devoted to everyday life shattered illusions about the Romans being ‘just like us’, the cumulative effect of the shunga show makes its protagonists more human. Timothy Clark et al. (eds). Shunga: sex and pleasure in Japanese art (London: British Museum Press, 2013). ISBN 978-0-714-12476-6. a b Shugo Asano & Timothy Clark (1995). The Passionate Art of Kitagawa Utamaro. Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha. ISBN 978-0-7141-1474-3.