Shunga: Sex and Pleasure in Japanese Art

Product Information

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..!! 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) 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. 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). 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] As diverse as the variety of people depicted, as various was the variety of the sex acts themselves. Heterosexual encounters in all imaginable forms formed the bulk of the pictures. Gay and lesbian encounters were however also present as well as rather fantastic trysts. 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 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 VictoriaBut shunga were a popular mainstay and an important part of itinerant book lenders’ business. They would go to a house, show the books available, lend out the ones desired and recollect them after an agreed period of time. At the time, that was most likely the most common way to enjoy shunga. Men and women were both eager customers.

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…!! ReviewFig.3. ‘ Festival mask‘ (c.1805) from the series ‘ Ehon takara gura (Treasure Room of Love)‘ by Kitagawa Utamaro

Similarly, boys of the Wakashū age range were considered erotically attractive and often performed the female parts in kabuki productions. Many of them worked as gigolos. These carried the same fetish of the sex worker, with the added quality of often being quite young. They are often depicted with samurai, since wakashū and older samurai often formed couples with the elder acting as a mentor for the younger. On the other hand, no artists are known today who produced only shunga. Shunga were not the work of specialized pornographers. Sex was considered a natural part of life in Edo Japan and the production of erotic images reflected this point of view. Katsushika Hokusai: Gods of Myriad Conjugal Delights (1821) Sex in Edo Times 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]

Shunga

Though heterosexual marriage was the expectation during the Edo period, same-sex relations were not explicitly prohibited by Shintoism or Buddhism, the dominant religions of the era, or by Tokugawa law. This was particularly the case for sex and romance between men, which assumed myriad different forms dictated by social factors including class, profession and age. 21 See Chalmers, note 8, ‘Sexual liaisons commonly occurred between priests and their young lovers (chigo/wakashu), samurai (nenja) and youths (chigo), and male kabuki actors or male prostitutes (kagema) and their patrons. Moreover, within this period male sexual relations were not exclusively homosexual but part of broader bisexual practices’, in Sharon Chalmers, ‘Tolerance, form and female disease: the pathologisation of lesbian sexuality in Japanese society’, Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context, issue 6, August 2001. The concept of shūdō (male love; to ‘lay down one’s life’) was a central principle of Edo’s samurai culture, and sex and romance between men is a common subject celebrated in both shunga and historical Japanese literature. 22 See eighteenth-century samurai manual Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure (Book of the Samurai). As Leupp explains: The generous vocabulary of terms relating to male-male sex in early modern Japanese reflects a society at ease with the phenomenon. Anyone perusing the abundant primary and secondary sources will encounter numerous allusions to the “male eros” (nanshoku); “the way of youths” (wakashūdō, often abbreviated as jakudō or shudō); the “way of men” ( nandō); “the beautiful way” ( bidō); and the “secret way” ( hidō). All these are euphemisms for male-male sex, conforming to certain specific conventions’. Timothy Clark et al. (eds). Shunga: sex and pleasure in Japanese art (London: British Museum Press, 2013). ISBN 978-0-714-12476-6. Shunga, as a subset of ukiyo-e, was enjoyed by all social groups in the Edo period, despite being out of favor with the shogunate. The ukiyo-e movement sought to idealize contemporary urban living and appeal to the new chōnin class. Shunga followed the aesthetics of everyday life and widely varied in its depictions of sexuality. Most ukiyo-e artists made shunga at some point in their careers.