The fantasy world of Shunga

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The imaginative world of Japanese erotica is on show at ‘Shunga, Sex and Pleasure in Japanese Art’. Clare Finn reports from the British Museum

For two centuries Japan’s self-imposed isolation led it to develop an etiquette and behaviour surrounding sex distinctly different not just from that of the West but also from that of its nearest Asian neighbours. The British Museum, founded to show how different societies do things in different ways, tackles that approach in this show. Unsurprisingly, little archaeological evidence exists for who did what, which way up and with whom, but images survive, especially in Japan: their seductively engaging Shunga.

To the West Shunga was obscene, characterized as vile, though the French 19th-century writer, Edmond de Goncourt also noted its charm and humour:

The other day I bought some albums of Japanese obscenities. They delight me, amuse me, and charm my eyes, I look on them as being beyond obscenity, which is there, yet seems not to be there, and which I do not see, so completely does it disappear into fantasy…

Mainly associated with the ‘Floating World’ images of Edo (1600–1868) when prolific numbers of exquisite woodblock Shunga were produced, it developed earlier. In Japanese creation myths, Japan originates from the sexual congress of two deities, shown in Hiroshige’s  19th-century Deities Perform Music to Tempt the Sun Goddess. Early Shunga is preserved through copies but the exhibition includes a 15th-century scroll of a penis-measuring contest. Early Shunga was richly decorated and hand-painted scrolls or books, some images lustrously scattered with gold leaf. Costly to commission, equivalent in price to 300 litres of soya beans at the time, they were luxury items for courtiers and society’s upper echelons. Then, in the Edo Period, printed Shunga became available to other classes. By paying extra, customers could buy sets of woodblock prints brilliantly hand-coloured almost like the earlier specially commissioned hand-painted scroll paintings.

Encouraging sensual pleasure for all participants, these images were enjoyed by both sexes, young and old alike. Women’s sexual experience was likened to the seasons, characterized by four stages: initial nervousness, through liberation and maturity to final ripe satisfaction.

Discreet but not ‘under-the-counter’ Shunga was made by almost every major artist in Edo, Kyoto and Osaka: Moronobu, Hanbei, Jihei, Kiyonobu I, Masanobu, Sukenobu, Harunobu, Koryusai, Shigemasa, Kiyonaga, Shunsho, Shuncho, Utamaro (a fifth of whose output was sexually explicit), Eishi, Settei, who championed female sexual pleasure, Hokusai, Toyokuni I, Kunisada, Kuniyoshi and Eisen. Like other genres, Shunga images were printed by master printmakers who lavished their skills on them. The choicest papers, the finest cut woodblock lines, richness of colour, embossing (Harunobu’s Snowball depicts snow on bamboo by embossing the paper) – all added sensuous tactility to the works.

Fabrics are important, adorning and framing the body, evoking elegance and sensuousness, a frisson from a flash of a red undergarment against pale skin. Utamaro’s skilfully modulated patterns on a robe suggest the curving body beneath. But the idea that Shunga’s pervasiveness implies nefarious goings on behind every shoji screen across Japan are undoubtedly untrue. Made to create an unproblematic fantasy world of sexual wish-fulfilment, Hokusai’s well-known The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife makes this evident, being clearly a sexual fantasy.

Mostly Shunga shows everyday couples but it depicts same sex pairings as well as female sex workers. As the Edo period progressed, Shunga increasingly parodied classic tales, Kabuki and Noh dramas, and educational texts. Printed, though not painted, Shunga was declared illegal in 1722 for political reasons not prurient ones, because it showed inappropriate mixing of social classes.   

Early in the 1600s outraged Western officials of the East Company had burnt Shunga as depraved and little reached Europe until the late 1800s. After 1859, when Japan opened several ports for international trade, Japanese prints flooded abroad. Yet just as the West was discovering Shunga, Japan’s Meiji government began clamping down on it to appear more Western. For most of the 1900s in Japan it was supressed and treatedas pornography. Laws declared that sex organs or pubic hair could not be shown. Change also came with the camera: similarly posed tableaux lack Shunga’s charm.

Ignored academically until recently, it is a huge subject and this exhibition and accompanying encyclopaedic publication reflect its complexity over five chronological sections; Early Shunga before 1765, Masterpieces of Shunga 1765–1850, Censorship, Contexts for Shunga, and Shunga in the Meiji Era. With 35 authors and 400 illustrations, the catalogue covers multiple perspectives. With 170 exhibits the exhibition can also be relished on many levels.

Art or pornography? Surely not the latter. With perfect line, Torii Kiyonaga’s suggestively long narrow prints emphasize his bodies’ undulating contours, and warm, tender emotions through facial expressions. Shunga is so very human, retaining a reverence for sex’s pleasures. It is a love letter to sex and its humour bubbles through in the small frog gawping at a beauty’s vagina as she steps from a bath, or the cat extending a playful paw to toy with a gentleman’s ‘baubles’ while he, engrossed in his partner, never hesitates in his stride.

The catalogue for Shunga, Sex and Pleasure in Japanese Art is published by the British Museum Press, London, 2013