春画: The Art Japan Was Last to Be Allowed to See

In the autumn of 2015 there was a queue along a quiet street in Mejiro, in Tokyo, outside a small privately run museum called the Eisei Bunko. People waited in the cold to see an exhibition of Japanese art, made in Japan, by the most celebrated Japanese artists who have ever lived. Around two hundred thousand of them came before it closed.

It was the first substantial shunga exhibition ever held in Japan. It happened two years after the British Museum had mounted one in London, and it happened at a small private institution because the public museums, asked in turn, declined.

Hold those two facts side by side, because between them sits the whole subject. This is an art form that Edo Japan produced in enormous quantity, that almost every major printmaker worked in, that was given to brides and carried by soldiers — and that the country which made it was, four centuries later, the last place on earth able to hang it on a wall.

春画 means, flatly, "spring pictures". The 春 is a borrowing: Chinese erotic albums were 春宮画, pictures of the spring palace, and spring had long been the polite euphemism for the thing itself. So the standard name is already a piece of tact — a word doing the work of not saying a word.

But the words the trade actually used are more revealing, and this is where a reader should slow down. They were 枕絵, pillow pictures. They were 艶本, glossy or amorous books. And most tellingly they were 笑い絵 — laughing pictures.

Laughing pictures. Not forbidden pictures, not secret pictures, not shameful pictures. A genre that names itself after the sound people made while looking at it has told you, before any scholar arrives, roughly what kind of room it was looked at in — and it was not, most of the time, a locked one.

The deep root is Chinese and it is clinical rather than pornographic. Han and Tang medical literature treated sexual practice as a branch of health and longevity, with illustrated manuals to match, and that material travelled to Japan with everything else that came from the continent. Erotic images arrived in this country wearing a doctor’s coat.

By the Heian period there is a Japanese word for such pictures — おそくず, written 偃息図 — and they are referred to in court writing as something that existed and circulated. The most famous surviving early example is 『小柴垣草紙』, a handscroll depicting a genuine scandal: the imperial priestess of the Kamo shrine, who was supposed to be ritually pure, and a guardsman. It is explicit, it is beautifully drawn, and it is about a real institutional embarrassment at the very top of the court.

What turns a courtly curiosity into a mass art form is technology and money. Edo brought commercial woodblock printing, a literate city population approaching a million, and a publishing trade that could put a coloured image into an ordinary person’s hands for the price of a meal. From the late seventeenth century onward, and especially after full-colour 錦絵 printing arrives in the 1760s, shunga stops being something a few aristocrats own and becomes something a city consumes.

This is the point at which most readers’ assumptions quietly break. Shunga was not the disreputable sideline of minor artists. Hishikawa Moronobu, who effectively invents the ukiyo-e print, made it. Suzuki Harunobu, the great innovator of colour printing, made it. Kitagawa Utamaro, the supreme portraitist of women in Japanese art, made 『歌まくら』 — Poem of the Pillow, 1788 — which is by common scholarly consent among the finest things he or anyone in the tradition ever produced.

And Katsushika Hokusai — the man who made the wave that is on half the tote bags in the world — produced 『喜能会之故真通』 in 1814, which contains the single most reproduced erotic image in the history of art outside Europe: a female pearl diver entwined with two octopuses. It is usually called The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife. It is, in the original, accompanied by text in which all three parties speak.

Put plainly: if you removed shunga from the record, you would not be removing a footnote from Japanese art. You would be removing a substantial body of work by its first rank, at the height of their powers, in a form they took entirely seriously.

Here are the fun facts, and they are not decoration — each one is evidence about the culture that produced them.

Shunga went into a bride’s trousseau. A young woman leaving for a marriage could be sent with an erotic album among her belongings, as practical instruction and as a wish for a fertile household. Consider what has to be true of a society for a mother to pack that.

Samurai carried it into battle. These were 勝ち絵, victory pictures, tucked into armour as a charm against death. The logic is not obscure once you say it out loud — the most alive thing imaginable, carried against the most dead thing imaginable.

It was kept in storehouses and homes as a charm against fire — a serious concern in a wooden city that burned repeatedly. And it was, routinely, looked at together: by couples, by groups of women, by friends. The comic strain in the genre only makes sense if you picture more than one person in the room. You do not write a punchline for a solitary reader.

Women were readers, not only subjects. The lending libraries, 貸本屋, that carried these books served households, and the scholarship on their circulation does not describe a male-only trade. That single correction rearranges the whole picture for most people who arrive expecting Edo pornography to look like modern pornography.

Two features strike every newcomer, and both are usually misread.

The first is that the figures are dressed. Full nudity is comparatively rare; what you see is silk, pattern, an open collar, a robe displaced. This is not prudery. Edo eroticism ran through cloth — the quality of a textile, the way a garment fell open, the glimpse rather than the exposure — and an artist who stripped his figures would have thrown away most of his expressive range along with the information about who these people were.

The second is the scale of the genitals, which are frequently enormous, and which art historians are quite clear about: this is not failed anatomy by people who had never seen a body. It is emphasis, in a tradition entirely comfortable with distorting scale for meaning — the same tradition that draws a hero’s sword longer than his arm. The organs are large because they are the subject. Faces, meanwhile, are often serene, which produces the strange doubled quality of the genre: hydraulic exaggeration below, composure above.

And there is almost always writing. Dialogue runs through the image; the figures talk, complain, joke, negotiate. Some of it is tender and some of it is filthy and a good deal of it is funny. An image whose participants are given speech is an image that has conceded they are people with opinions about what is happening — which is, quietly, a rather high bar, and one a great deal of erotic art in any century fails to clear.

So what does it mean that this existed while being formally forbidden? The honest answer requires taking the prohibition seriously first, and then looking at what actually happened under it.

The prohibition was real. The Kyōhō reforms of 1722 formally banned the publication of erotic books, as part of a broad programme of moral and fiscal tightening. It was never repealed. Shunga was, for the remaining century and a half of the Edo period, illegal to produce.

And it was produced continuously, at scale, by the most famous artists alive, for a hundred and fifty years. The trade adapted rather than stopped: works went out unsigned or under transparent pseudonyms, publishers left their marks off, and distribution moved through lending libraries and private channels rather than shopfronts. Enforcement was sporadic and generally fell on whoever had become conspicuous.

So what does that tell us? Not that Edo Japan had no rules about sex — it had a great many, and they were stratified by class and status in ways that could be brutal. What it tells us is something more precise and more interesting: that the state’s objection was to publicity, commerce and disorder rather than to the depiction of pleasure as such. Nobody was arguing that the images were spiritually corrupting or that the bodies in them were sinful. That vocabulary was not available, because the religious framework that generates it was not there.

Here is the part that reverses most people’s assumptions, and it is the heart of the matter.

Shunga was not silenced by feudal Japan. It was silenced by modern Japan. The Meiji state, rebuilding itself under the gaze of Western powers it needed to be taken seriously by, imported a legal and moral apparatus that had no room for this material at all. Article 175 of the 1907 Penal Code criminalised the distribution of obscene matter. It is still in force today.

The consequence is extraordinary when you set it out. For most of the twentieth century, the country that produced this art could not publish it. Images appeared, if at all, with the critical areas blacked out or scraped away. Scholars worked with material they could not fully reproduce. Meanwhile the finest collections were in London, Boston and Paris, assembled by foreigners who had bought freely in the nineteenth century, and it was foreign institutions that could exhibit what Japanese ones could not.

That is the resolution of the puzzle this page opened on — why outsiders prize this so loudly, and why the celebration came from abroad first. It is partly genuine aesthetic recognition; Japonisme was real, and Rodin, Beardsley, Toulouse-Lautrec and Klimt all sat in front of Japanese prints and changed what they did afterwards. But it is also, unglamorously, an accident of jurisdiction. Foreigners have been able to look at it, publish it and study it for a century and a quarter longer than the Japanese public has.

And the foreign gaze is not innocent either. A good deal of Western enthusiasm for shunga has run on the fantasy that Japan was a place without sexual guilt — a projection screen for whatever the viewer’s own culture had made him feel bad about. The scholarship does not support the fantasy, and a reader should be as suspicious of the admiring version as of the disapproving one.

An essay that treasures this art and cannot say the following is a brochure, so: the pleasure quarters that supplied a great deal of shunga’s subject matter ran on indenture. The women depicted in 吉原 interiors were, in very many cases, sold into a contract as children and working out a debt that was structured not to end. This chamber has a separate essay on that economy and does not soften it here.

The images idealise. A print of a courtesan in a beautiful room, laughing, is a commercial image made for a market, and reading it as documentary evidence about her life would be as naive as reading an advertisement as a diary.

And not all of it is warm. Within a body of work this large there are scenes of coercion, and scenes played for laughs that are not funny now. The best scholars say so plainly rather than curating them out. The honest position is that a tradition can contain both the most humane erotic art anyone made in the eighteenth century and images you would not want to defend, and that noticing the second does not require surrendering the first.

The deepest thing shunga records is an absence. There is no doctrine of the fallen body anywhere in it. No original sin, no flesh at war with spirit, no sense that desire is a defect to be managed. Buddhism supplied attachment as a problem and impermanence as a fact; neither of those produces shame about anatomy. Shinto has purity and pollution, but they are situational and cleanable rather than a permanent stain on being alive.

Take that framework away and what is left is not licence. It is ordinariness. Sex in shunga is not sacred and it is not dirty; it is one of the things people do, like eating and quarrelling and sleeping, and therefore a fit subject for the same range of treatment — tender, comic, beautiful, absurd, occasionally tedious. That is a genuinely different starting position from the one most of the world inherited, and it is worth sitting with rather than rushing past.

The word 浮世 helps here. It began as 憂き世, the sorrowful world, a Buddhist observation that everything passes. Edo took the same sound and rewrote the character to 浮世, the floating world — everything passes, so attend to it while it is here. Shunga is that revision drawn. It is not a culture that forgot life is short. It is a culture that remembered, and drew the conclusion the other way round.

And then the last turn, which is the one that should stay with you. The society that drew all this was not more free than ours in any simple sense: it was hierarchical, it was unequal, it bought and sold women, and it banned these very books. What it lacked was not rules. What it lacked was the conviction that pleasure is a moral failing. Those are separable, and we have tended to assume they are not — which is why a civilisation that finally hangs this work on a wall, as Japan did in 2015 to a two-hundred-thousand-strong queue, is not celebrating permissiveness. It is recovering something it had, lost in the course of becoming modern, and had to be handed back by strangers.

Not to claim a lineage. Moonlight does not descend from Edo print culture and would be inventing a pedigree if it said so. This page is here for a plainer reason: a great many people carry the belief that wanting things is a personal defect, and that belief feels like a fact about being human rather than a fact about a particular inheritance.

Shunga is four hundred years of evidence that it is not. Not a theory about how things might be otherwise — actual objects, by named artists, that a real society printed and handed to its daughters and carried into war. Whatever you were taught to feel about your own appetites, a very large number of intelligent people lived well without feeling it, in this country, within recent historical memory, and left the pictures to prove it.

A queue in Mejiro, in the cold, in 2015. Two hundred thousand people coming to look at pictures their great-great-grandparents could have bought on a street corner for the price of a bowl of noodles, and which their grandparents were not permitted to see at all. Nothing about the pictures changed in the interval. What changed was what a country believed it was allowed to admit about itself — and that, in the end, is the whole of what shunga has to teach, which is why it is worth this many words.