Shunga: Sex and Pleasure in Japanese Art

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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. 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 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. Full-colour printing, or nishiki-e, developed around 1765, but many shunga prints predate this. Prior to this, colour was added to monochrome prints by hand, and from 1744 benizuri-e allowed the production of prints of limited colours. Even after 1765 many shunga prints were produced using older methods. In some cases this was to keep the cost low, but in many cases this was a matter of taste.

Within the Edo Period, there were times when shunga were tolerated and times when they were officially prohibited. In the former case, the shunga were published with full credits to artists, wood carvers, and printers. In the latter, shunga were either sold as exclusive private prints or rented out by book lenders flouting the law.

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The wood print artists went for extremely oversized genitals. “Had I depicted it [the genitals] in its actual size, there would be nothing of interest. Don’t we say art is fantasy?” quotes the book Kokon chomonju ( Famous Sayings Old and New, 1254) a monk already painting shunga in the Kamakura Period (1185-1333). 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.

Only very recently can shunga be shown openly and uncensored in Japan again. At the time of this writing, for example, a large shunga exhibition can be seen at the Eisei Bunko Museum in Tokyo. Harunobu Suzuki: Enjoying the Evening Cool (1769) Shunga Exhibition at Eisei Bunko MuseumWhen 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. 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.