Why Japanese Erotica Is More Than Just Nudity and Porno

Can you guess the second most searched word on the British Museum website?

The museum blog 29 things you (probably) didn't know about the British Museum says, the first was Egypt, considering the number of mummies in the museum.

But the second most searched word might blow your mind.

It is "shunga".

A Japanese erotic art that blossomed from the 17th century to the 19th century under the Edo period.

To modern eyes, this art might look pornographic and obscene. But like Kamasutra is much more than sexual positions, shunga is not all about nudity and sexual pleasure.

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What is shunga?

The term "shunga" literally means "spring pictures", a euphemism for erotic art, which flourished when Japan's population was growing rapidly and contact with the west was prohibited.

It was created by artists who belonged to the popular school of art ukiyo-e.

The term ukiyo-e translates to "pictures of the floating world".

The artists produced woodblock prints and paintings of Japanese female beauties, travel scenes, landscapes, and erotica.

Shunga art became a visual platform for artists where sex and homosexuality were not only acknowledged but also encouraged.

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Why shunga art was way more than nudity and sexual pleasure?

• When Christianity and the western tradition painted the picture of idealized Greek nudes in the art discourse and the clergy deemed sex as sinful and obscene, the eastern tradition celebrated sex. Shunga art portrayed caricatured bodies, playful sexual gestures, and candidness among couples.

• When western art promoted nudity and restricted it only to mythological gods and goddesses, shunga art showed courtesans, same-sex couples, and men dressed in elaborate grab while having sex. Notice the lesbian couple wrapped in lavish drapery in the below image.

Professor Timon Screech from the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) says, "It is much more likely that people thought beautiful, fine clothes were more sexually arousing than skin. Skin is what workers exposed in the street or what you saw at the bathhouse."

• The males and females were shown with exaggerated genitalia. Reason? Upon my research, I found an interesting one - the genitalia is interpreted as "second face", expressing the primal passions that women were forced to conceal. Shunga gave the medium for artists to portray unbridled emotions, and hence, the genitalia was the same size as their heads.

• Over time, shunga images became sex guides to young couples. The women loved to keep them in their bridal trousseau and simply it was used as a medium of laughter exchange amongst couples.

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Lastly

When sex was hush-hush in western art rhetoric and painters had to suppress their creativity, artists like Katsushika Hokusai created erotica, that has fascinated audiences for centuries.

A perfect example of shunga - The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife, which displays a fisherman's wife entwined sexually and deriving pleasure with a pair of octopuses, the smaller one kisses her while the larger one performs cunnilingus.

One interpretation of this composition is that the Japanese tend to call it Tako to ama. It literally translates to “Octopus and Shell Diver” which has an entirely different meaning from the prevailing English title. The Japanese title shows the woman as an independent pearl diver who rather has a unique passionate encounter with an octopus.

While the English title — The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife — detaches her as an independent woman and portrays her as a desperate wife dreaming her husband to be a type of mollusk he fishes or nets for.

This iconic image became a precursor to tentacle erotica, a motif that became popular in modern Japanese pornography.

Artists like Toulouse-Lautrec and Picasso encountered shunga for the first time, they were fascinated by its realism and audacity.

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References:

1. What is Shunga?

2. Historic Japanese erotica reveals Tokyo's sex secrets

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