Shunga and Sex in Japanese Art – From Hokusai’s Erotic Prints to Soft Sculpture and the Right to Depict Oneself
In one of Katsushika Hokusai’s best-known double-page spreads, a woman is surrounded by two octopuses and dense lines of text. Dialogue fills the spaces around the figures; to a viewer who cannot read Japanese, it may look like another pattern. The octopuses have long been familiar beyond the history of art: they have been reproduced, discussed and presented as evidence of Japanese culture’s distinctive relationship with sexual fantasy. The words beside them have almost always been left out of the picture. The scene lost its voices, even though Hokusai had given its participants something to say.
The spread from the 1814 book Kinoe no komatsu is commonly known as The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife. The British Museum describes the woman as a diver; the accompanying text helps us interpret the subject. The museum’s reading concerns a particular work and cannot establish how everyone in Japan regarded such images. The spread appears in the third volume: it had neighbouring pages, a place within a book and a reader who could turn the page. A standalone reproduction interrupts that sequence. What remains is a woman whose story is now told primarily by the person looking at her.
Japanese erotica has repeatedly been subjected to the same narrative. A few images were enough to construct an account of a culture that supposedly always treated sex more freely than others. Or of a culture of peculiar prohibitions and still more peculiar ways around them. Details disrupt both narratives. A wooden patch turns up in a printing block, a book lies among family possessions for decades, a strip of cloth appears in front of an exhibited canvas. Behind each object is someone’s decision: to update a product, preserve a mother’s gift or cover part of an image. These small acts help us understand who controlled representations of the body and on what terms they reached a viewer.
The History of Shunga: New Hairstyles for an Old Desire
Shunga, literally “spring pictures”, is a genre of Japanese erotic art that became particularly widespread during the Edo period. Today, Japanese erotic prints are easy to imagine as individual sheets in museum display cases. Yet much of this culture circulated in books: they were printed, bound, reissued and rented out. The image was part of a publisher’s day-to-day business. Even the most unusual desire came with a tangible production cost.
The historian of Japanese books Ellis Tinios offers an almost perfect example of this economy. The printing blocks for Fūryū imosegawa, illustrated by Kawashima Nobukiyo, were cut in 1718. In the early 1760s, they were used again, after the figures’ heads had been replaced to bring their hairstyles into line with contemporary fashion. The technique was known as umeki. A section of the block was cut out, a wooden plug inserted and a new design carved into its surface. New text sheets accompanied the updated images. Around forty years separated the editions, but the scenes did not need to be remade entirely.
The buyer was offered an old book with the faces of their contemporaries. Forty years of publishing history were concealed in neatly carved wooden inserts: the bodies and compositions were retained, the hairstyles updated. Recognisable fashions were supposed to convince the reader that the product was new. This calculation sits uneasily with the idea of shunga as an expression of timeless Japanese sensuality. That sensuality had print runs, worn blocks and the costs of alterations.
Prohibitions also left their mark on publishing practices. Following the ban on erotic books in 1722, production resumed by the late 1740s. Many editions appeared without information that could identify their artist or publisher. Unqualified freedom in Edo is already difficult to claim: explicit scenes continued to be printed, while those responsible tried to make themselves less visible.
Who Held the Book?
Books reached their readers through more than shops. Hayakawa Monta draws attention to kashihon’ya, travelling book lenders who delivered publications to people’s homes and lent them for a fee. He suggests that women often received these orders, so an erotic book’s domestic life may have begun in women’s hands. This observation cannot tell us how many women read them or reconstruct their tastes. It does, however, unsettle the familiar scenario in which a man buys an image of a woman and has sole control over it.
Women over eighty contacted Hayakawa. Their mothers had given them shunga when they married, and the books had remained treasured personal possessions for decades. Now their owners were worried: after they died, their children might discover the images and misunderstand why they had kept them. Some hoped to donate the books to a research centre. An object passed down within a family could thus return to public life through a scholarly collection.
Over several decades, the same book acquired a different meaning. First, a mother passed it on as a wedding gift. Then her daughter kept it among her personal belongings. Towards the end of her life, its owner began to wonder what her own children would make of the discovery. The images remained the same; the anticipated explanation for their presence in the home had changed. Giving the book to researchers meant preserving the object and sparing the family conjectures that its owner would no longer be able to answer.
The presence of women among readers does not in itself turn an erotic book into an instrument of liberation. Laura Moretti examines Onna enshi kyōkun kagami, an erotic reworking of eighteenth-century instructional literature for women. Its reproduced cover has a worn green surface, a vertical strip bearing the title and later museum labels. Behind this unassuming exterior, the authors reworked familiar educational forms: poetry sections, literary narratives and information about the body. The joke depended on an encounter between two texts. A reader who did not recognise the instructional original would miss part of the game.
Moretti does not treat parody as an automatic rejection of moral instruction. Entertainment, information about the body and traditional ideas about marriage and household well-being coexisted in the book. We often expect an explicit image to make a protest. Here, that expectation distorts the reading: the authors could rework a lesson, amuse a buyer and retain much of its original system of values.
The Bird That Watches Too
In an anonymous Shunga scroll from the 1840s–1870s in the National Gallery of Victoria, two figures are positioned in front of a screen decorated with maple branches. Nearby lie a sheet of paper, an object wrapped in cloth and a small inrō case. What these contained is unknown. On the screen, a blue bird leans forward as if peering into the room. The researcher Annika Aitken identifies a voyeuristic motif in its posture. Even a painted interior decoration has been given the role of observer.
Hairstyles and clothing in Edo art conveyed information that is easy to overlook today. Yet these features are insufficient to establish the figures’ ages and identities or the intention of an unknown artist. Reading an old image requires knowledge of historical conventions; contemporary ideas about a person cannot automatically be applied to a figure in the scroll.
Who commissioned the scroll, who unrolled it, which conventions were legible to its first viewers? Research into shunga’s readership does not establish an individual artist’s intentions. One figure’s hairstyle does not reveal who bought the work. We have to compare incomplete evidence and distinguish an observable detail from conjecture. The bird on the screen neatly captures the researcher’s position: one can watch for a long time, but proximity to the scene does not itself provide knowledge of its participants.
The word “spring” does not guarantee untroubled content. Higuchi Kazutaka examines a scene of sexual violence in Ōyogari no koe, published in 1822 with illustrations by Utagawa Toyokuni, relating it to kabuki theatre and a crime narrative. This work frustrates any comfortable account of shunga as a realm of universal harmony. If we retain only humour and mutual pleasure, cruelty will disappear from our selection – but that never made it disappear from the history of the genre.
When a Painting Needed Clothes
Shunga survived the emergence of modern artistic institutions in Japan. Rosina Buckland traced how publishers adapted the erotic tradition to new printing methods and competition. Aki Ishigami turned to newspapers from the Meiji era through the pre-war years: public discussions increasingly associated familiar images with shame and prohibition. Books continued to pass from hand to hand as their reputation changed. Production, private reading and newspaper debates moved at different speeds.
At the same time, Japanese art was engaging with the European academic nude. In Kuroda Seiki’s Morning Toilette, painted in France in 1893, a woman stands with her back to the viewer, raising her hands to her hair. Her face and the front of her body are visible in a tall mirror; the reflection brings two views together in a single painting. The work was accepted at the Paris Salon, while its exhibition in Kyoto in 1895 provoked a scandal. In 1901, at an exhibition of the Hakubakai society, the police demanded that the lower part of another painting by Kuroda, Portrait of a Nude Woman, be covered. The episode became known as the “loincloth incident”.
In the second painting, a woman sits on fabric with her eyes lowered; a reddish background surrounds the pale figure. The demand to cover her image forced the organisers to intervene in a finished work. A strip of cloth divided the canvas into permitted and concealed areas. The viewer could see the boundary of that intervention and infer what had provoked the objections. This method of censorship left its own trace in plain sight: the hidden area acquired significance before it could be seen.
The episode cannot sustain a simple account of a free Japan corrupted by a prudish West. European academic training gave the artist grounds for painting an unclothed model, and recognition at the Salon affirmed the work’s professional standing. Japanese exhibition organisers and the police decided what could be shown to local audiences. Kuroda had to defend his artistic method in newspaper debates. Parisian recognition travelled with the painting; it did not override local restrictions.
Yayoi Kusama: A Chair You Cannot Settle Into
In New York in 1962, Yayoi Kusama covered an ordinary armchair with sewn and stuffed fabric forms that she called phalluses. Accumulation No. 1 retained the back, armrests and fringe at floor level. Everything else was occupied by uneven white protrusions: short and long, straight and bent, overlapping one another. On the armrests they spread outwards; on the seat they crowd into a dense mass. The furniture is immediately recognisable. Yet there is no visible space left to sit.
Each form bears the marks of work done by hand: fabric was sewn, stuffed and painted. The protrusions differ in length and curvature, so no regular repeating pattern emerged. The phallic symbol acquired a vulnerable softness and a dependence on a seam. Anxiety and comedy can both be read into it: too many forms jostle on a domestic object that once promised rest. No single one holds the attention for long – the eye moves on to the next.
Kusama associated the repeated making of these objects with a fear of sex and an attempt to confront it. The Whitney Museum cites her recollections of working through this experience. In that context, the recognisable sexual form calls for a careful reading: it could serve as material for an anxiety the artist was trying to process. Repetition and labour tell us more about how this practice worked than the choice of symbol alone.
According to MoMA’s commentary, critics at the time avoided discussing the sexual aspect of these sculptures directly. They could talk about surface, repetition and new materials. These observations were all relevant, yet they did not explain why Kusama had chosen these particular forms. Consistently excluding that question makes formal analysis resemble the approach of Kuroda’s exhibition organisers: the uncomfortable part of the work is covered over, this time with language.
How Much Can a Naked Body Tell Us?
Photography makes its own promises of truthfulness. A drawn figure can easily be dismissed as fantasy; we more often expect a photograph to testify to the person in front of the camera. Ryudai Takano published the photobook IN MY ROOM in 2005 and received the Kimura Ihei Photo Award for it. Yet photographic precision does not give us access to a model’s biography. Pose and gaze remain visible details, while conclusions about a person’s private life require other evidence.
On the cover, a person in a red shirt looks directly into the camera; the photograph is enclosed by a broad red border. This is a clothed portrait, although Takano also worked with nude models in the project itself. The cover already exposes the difficulty of interpretation: pose, gaze and clothing give the viewer ample grounds for conjecture, without turning those conjectures into biographical facts. A more detailed view of the body would not replace the person’s own account of themselves either.
Comparison with the anonymous scroll in Melbourne requires some distance. There, a researcher examines hairstyles and clothing in an attempt to reconstruct historical conventions. Here, the photographic record seems much more accessible. Yet the same mistake is possible in both cases: treating a recognisable external detail as a sufficient explanation of a person. The distinction between observation and supposition remains significant even in the most detailed image.
Rokudenashiko: Obscenity in the First Person
Megumi Igarashi, who works under the name Rokudenashiko, used the image of her own vulva in sculptural objects. These include a kayak based on a three-dimensional scan of her body and Ms Manko, a character appearing in drawings, figurines and soft toys. On the cover of What Is Obscenity?, a pink figure sits against a bright turquoise background: a folded outline frames a face with two black eyes and an open mouth. Its anatomical source has been stylised into a souvenir character. The same form moved between scanning technology, sculpture and the language of mass-market characters.
In her 2016 graphic memoir What Is Obscenity?, Rokudenashiko recounted her arrest and encounters with Japanese institutions that determined whether her work was permissible. Sara Sylvester reads the book as a feminist statement combining kawaii aesthetics with autobiography. A smiling character, souvenir-like forms and a light drawing style sit alongside an account of police intervention. This juxtaposition sustains the tension: familiar visual cuteness did not spare the artist serious consequences.
In the reproduced press-conference sequence, faces and dialogue are distributed across small black-and-white panels. Journalists’ questions follow one another; at the bottom, the artist appears in close-up and states her artistic purpose. Rokudenashiko chose the size of the panels, the order of the questions and the moment of her own response. Those accustomed to judging her work were incorporated into her composition. The reader could now examine their reactions too – through the account of a person who had previously been discussed by others.
No straight line of liberation can be drawn from Hokusai’s print to Rokudenashiko’s comic. The conditions of production, audiences and circumstances of display were too different. Across that distance, however, a recurring question becomes visible: who gets to explain the depicted body? A publisher changed a hairstyle, the police obscured part of a canvas, a critic chose words for a soft sculpture. Every decision directed the gaze. The autobiographical comic added the artist’s own account to these voices.
It is worth returning to Hokusai’s spread for the text. We have already recognised the octopuses, called the scene strange and perhaps drawn a conclusion about an entire culture. The dialogue remains unread. Attentive reading begins with this discomfort: people were speaking on the page before we arrived. What will we have to change in our own story if we finally hear them?
