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. Travel and landscapes, studies of the daily work and pleasures of the Edo (present-day Tokyo) population as well as the farmers, fishermen, merchants, soldiers, samurai, and daimyo in the provinces were realistically and often humorously captured by skilled artists such as Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849), Utamaro Kitagawa (1753-1806), Harunobu Suzuki (1725-1770) and Eishi Chobunsai (1756-1829). 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.

The art of shunga provided an inspiration for the Shōwa (1926–1989) and Heisei (1989–2019) art in Japanese video games, anime and manga known in the Western world as hentai and known formally in Japan as jū hachi kin (adult-only, literally "18-restricted"). Like shunga, hentai is sexually explicit in its imagery. 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. Annika Aitken is Curator, Art Museums, at the University of Melbourne, where she is also undertaking a PhD in Art History. From 2018 to 2021 she was Assistant Curator, Asian Art, at the National Gallery of Victoria 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”).

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: Shunga were produced between the sixteenth century and the nineteenth century by ukiyo-e artists, since they sold more easily and at a higher price than their ordinary work. Shunga prints were produced and sold either as single sheets or—more frequently—in book form, called enpon. These customarily contained twelve images, a tradition with its roots in Chinese shunkyu higa. Shunga was also produced in hand scroll format, called kakemono-e (掛け物絵). This format was also popular, though more expensive as the scrolls had to be individually painted. While a painting would be an original that could be sold only once at a time, identical wood prints could be made available for a relatively low price to a wide range of the population. You could also help us a lot by letting us know what you think of the eBook by placing a reaction below. If you’d prefer to remain anonymous you can also add only your initials to the comment..!!

Among the most famous ukiyo-e today is Katsushika Hokusai’s series 36 Views of Mt. Fuji, including The Great Wave off Kanagawa, known to virtually everyone with even the slightest interest in Japan. Shunga 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 people depicted ranged from noblemen to samurai to kabuki actors to just regular people such as merchants and farmers. Very common was the portrayal of prostitutes at their work with their customers. Virtually no stratum of society was excluded. Where ‘ dan’ and ‘ nanshoku’ mean ‘male love’; that is, between men, ‘ joshoku’ (‘female love’) might be misinterpreted to mean the corresponding term for women. In reality, however, the term refers to the attraction of men to women. Within this male-centric rubric, no fixed term encompassing romantic love, or sex, between women existed in Japan until the 1910s when the term d ō seiai (same-sex love) first appeared. As Peichen Wu asserts, it was not until the existence of this term that discourse around the subject could emerge in any formal sense, or that lesbianism (or bisexuality) could be formally recognised as a legitimate category of sexuality and sexual identity in Japan. 23 Women’s Sexualities and Masculinities in a Globalizing Asia, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2007, p. 80. The publication of newsletter Subarashi Onna (Wonderful Women) in 1975, and book Onna wo ai suru onnatachi no monogatari (Stories of women who love women) in 1987 are often referred to as the first first-person accounts of female relationships in Japan – a century and a half later than the NGV’s scroll and some two centuries later than early examples of female sex in shunga. 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.

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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).

In the same year Utamaro also produced the most famous shunga album in the history of Japanese art the ‘ Poem of the Pillow (Utamakura)‘. It is outstanding for its technical brilliance of the engraving and the extraordinary quality of the colours. It exposes his greatness as an artist, portraying a mixture of subjects (such as the Dutch couple) and settings, all of them taking an unprecedented level and degree of intensity, the capacity to express passionate feelings and the conception of the human figure, particularly that of the female body. Tenderness 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. Works depicting courtesans have since been criticised for painting an idealised picture of life in the pleasure quarters. It has been argued that they masked the situation of virtual slavery under which sex workers lived. [9] However, Utamaro is just one example of an artist who was sensitive to the inner life of the courtesan, for example showing them wistfully dreaming of escape from Yoshiwara through marriage. [8] a b c Hayakawa, Monta; C. Andrew Gerstle (2013). "Who Were the Audiences for "Shunga" ". Japan Review (26): 26. JSTOR 41959815.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 For 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. 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. 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]

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. 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. In fact, ama (female pearl divers) formed their own subculture at the time and they typically dived naked. Much later, in the 1960s, pink movies also put a focus on the always fascinating ama. 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 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) a b c d e f Screech, Timon (1999). Sex and the Floating World. London: Reaktion Books. pp.13–35. ISBN 1-86189-030-3.