A standing man lifts a woman entirely off the ground in both arms. The woman’s legs wrap around the man’s hips, her arms around his neck. The Edo erotic-book writers compared the lifted body of the woman to the body of a Jizo Bodhisattva statue lifted in the arms of a devotee at a roadside shrine, and named the configuration dakijizou, the embraced Jizo. The name documents the unrestricted operations of the Edo-period erotic-book vocabulary, which freely borrowed from the religious-and-secular vocabulary of daily life in a way that the post-Enlightenment-modern sensibility no longer regards as available.

Dakijizou (Japanese: 抱き地蔵, daki-jizō, “embraced-Jizo”) is one of the variants in the Edo-period forty-eight positions (shijūhatte) classification, in which the inserting partner stands and lifts the receiving partner’s body entirely off the ground in both arms. The receiving partner’s legs wrap around the inserting partner’s hips, and the arms wrap around the neck or shoulders to distribute the body-weight. The name references the religious-devotional practice of lifting a Jizo Bodhisattva statue (jizō, the kṣitigarbha bodhisattva of Buddhist tradition).

Overview

The configuration is a variant of the face-to-face standing class in which the receiving partner’s feet are completely off the ground. The inserting partner supports the woman’s hips or thighs with both arms; the receiving partner wraps both arms around the inserting partner’s neck or shoulders to distribute the body-weight. The receiving partner has effectively no freedom of motion, and the configuration places the entire weight of both partners on the inserting partner’s leg-strength, arm-strength, and core-strength.

In the forty-eight-positions canon, dakijizou is a frequent subject of Edo-period shunga erotic-book imagery, but it does not belong to the central-and-standard class of positions alongside honte (basic missionary), chausu, and matsuba-kuzushi. The configuration is one of the variant-and-difficult class, valued more for compositional novelty and comic registration than for practical-frequency-of-use in actual sexual practice. In contemporary adult-video vocabulary, the same body-configuration appears under the name ekiben (station-bento), and dakijizou survives principally in the classical-Edo-cultural register.

The position requires substantial physical-strength from the inserting partner. With the receiving partner’s weight typically in the 50kg range for an adult woman, and with the combined weight of the two bodies typically in the 100kg range, prolonged maintenance is in practice impossible. The frequent depiction in Edo erotic-book imagery of the inserting partner with the back against a column or wall reflects the artist’s understanding of this anatomical-mechanical constraint.

Etymology

The name combines daki (抱き, “embracing”) with jizō (地蔵), the Japanese-Buddhist name for the bodhisattva kṣitigarbha. The Jizo bodhisattva was widely worshipped in Japan from the medieval period onward, with stone-statue depictions placed at roadsides, in graveyards, and at small shrines under the names koyasu-jizō (child-protecting Jizo), mizuko-jizō (water-child Jizo, for unborn or stillborn children), and enmei-jizō (life-extending Jizo). The Jizo statues are typically small (around one shaku, approximately thirty centimetres) and made of stone; the devotional practice of lifting the statue from its stand and embracing it during a prayer (daki-jizō, omokaru-jizō) was performed at numerous Jizo shrines and is documented in the folkloric record.

The Edo erotic-book authors transposed the body-form of this religious-devotional practice onto the sexual-position configuration of the man lifting and embracing the woman. The naming-operation places a sacred religious-devotional object alongside the secular sexual-encounter configuration. The operation documents the Edo-period cultural-sensibility in which sexual-vocabulary and religious-vocabulary occupied a continuous semantic domain, with no strict sacred-secular separation. Similar religious-vocabulary appropriations in the forty-eight-positions canon include kannon-biraki (Buddhist-altar-doors-opened, comparing the spread legs to the altar-doors) and the daruma-gaeshi (Daruma-doll-turn, comparing the folded posture to the toppled Daruma doll); dakijizou belongs in this same sub-genre of religious-furniture-and-figure-derived position-names.

English-language vocabulary has no direct equivalent. Contemporary translations render the configuration functionally as standing carry or lifted standing position. The Chinese fang-zhong-shu literature documents structurally-similar standing-lift configurations under different metaphorical-source names. The cross-cultural recurrence of standing-lift configurations under different naming-conventions reflects the recognizability of the configuration as a distinct sexual-position class, rather than a translation-trace.

Historical record

Appearance in Edo erotic-book imagery

The first explicit appearance of the dakijizou name in the erotic-book record is not precisely datable, but configurations consistent with the dakijizou-type composition appear with high frequency in the forty-eight-positions erotic-book corpus from the Hishikawa Moronobu Koi no Mutsugoto Shijūhatte (1670s) onward, indicating that the configuration was widely recognised by the early Edo period. The major late-Edo erotic-book artists — Suzuki Harunobu, Torii Kiyonaga, Kitagawa Utamaro, Katsushika Hokusai, and Utagawa Kunisada — all produced works depicting standing-position configurations including the dakijizou-type.

Hokusai’s Kinoe no Komatsu (1814) includes multiple scenes in which the man lifts the woman in the corner of a room with the woman’s back against a structural column, with detailed depiction of the woman’s facial expression, the flow of the hair, the white of the tabi socks, and the musculature of the man’s legs. Hokusai’s compositional preference for geometric body-arrangement is particularly visible in the dakijizou compositions, in which the vertical-axis-line shared by the two figures becomes the structural core of the picture-plane.

Keisai Eisen’s Keichū Kibun Makura Bunko (1822) is the Edo erotic-book corpus that documents each forty-eight-position with both text-and-image. Dakijizou is introduced in this corpus as one of the difficult variant-class standing positions, with accompanying text noting the position’s suitability for a strong-legged man and a light-bodied woman.

Senryū and comic-vocabulary appropriation

The dakijizou name was appropriated outside the erotic-book domain into Edo senryū verse, comic prints, and sharebon fiction. In senryū verse, dakijizou functioned often less as a reference to the actual sexual configuration than as a comic-target image of the man’s effortful body-lifting and the woman’s body-weight. Verses such as “dakijizō / not knowing the weight / morning sleeper” mock the man’s strain and the woman’s mass simultaneously as comic-vocabulary material.

Modern marginalisation

The Meiji-period (post-1868) influx of Victorian-Western sexual-morality vocabulary, combined with the codification of Article 175 of the Japanese Penal Code regulating obscenity, drove the erotic-book corpus underground. The forty-eight-positions naming-system, including dakijizou, was replaced in the academic register by modern medical and sex-science vocabulary (“face-to-face standing position,” “standing face-to-face position”), with the classical Edo-period naming surviving only in postwar adult-magazine special-features and similar marginal-register publications.

Anatomical structure and movement

The dakijizou configuration is classified as a variant of the face-to-face standing class. The inserting partner flexes the knees slightly and tilts the pelvis anteriorly to support the receiving partner’s hips with both arms. The receiving partner wraps both thighs around the inserting partner’s hips, and wraps both arms around the inserting partner’s neck, distributing the body-weight across the contact-points.

The angle of insertion is determined by the interaction between the receiving partner’s hip-tilt and the inserting partner’s anterior-pelvic-tilt, and can be adjusted by varying the height-of-lift. If the inserting partner extends the knees and lifts the receiving partner high, the engagement runs shallower; if the inserting partner flexes the knees and tilts the pelvis anteriorly, the engagement runs deeper.

The load on the inserting partner is extreme. The configuration requires the inserting partner to support the receiving partner’s full body-weight (approximately 50kg in the adult-female case) with both arms, while simultaneously supporting the combined body-weight of both partners (approximately 100kg) with both legs, and adding the anterior-posterior motion of the hips to produce the engagement-rhythm. Prolonged maintenance is in practice impossible. The frequent depiction in Edo erotic-book imagery of the inserting partner against a column or wall reflects this anatomical-mechanical constraint. The position depends on the inserting partner’s grip-and-arm strength for the receiving partner’s safety, making the configuration one that presupposes mutual trust.

Position in contemporary use

Relationship to ekiben in AV

In contemporary adult-content production, the body-configuration corresponding to dakijizou is most commonly named ekiben (station-bento). The ekiben name refers to the box-lunch vendors of the early-twentieth-century railway-platform who carried the lunch-boxes suspended on straps around the neck. The Edo religious-vocabulary naming of dakijizou and the modern-urban-life naming of ekiben derive from different vocabulary-source domains, and the modern adult-content vocabulary overwhelmingly uses ekiben, with dakijizou surviving only in period-drama productions and shunga-reconstruction art productions.

The relationship between the two names is one in which the same body-configuration is named simultaneously by an Edo-period religious-cultural vocabulary and by a modern-urban-life vocabulary. The two naming-traditions document the same configuration from different cultural-perspective angles, with the dakijizou foregrounding the lifted-body / lifted-statue analogy and the ekiben foregrounding the suspended-box / suspended-body analogy.

Reproduction in dōjinshi and adult manga

In adult manga and dōjinshi, the standing-position insertion-scene is a recurring compositional-climax device. The standing-position composition produces a vertical-axis line through both figures’ bodies, generating compositional tension and pulling the reader’s gaze to the page-centre. The Edo shunga dakijizou compositional tradition can be read as a distant ancestor of this contemporary pictorial preference.

References in period-drama and historical-fiction adult productions

Period-drama adult productions, historical-vocabulary essays, and Edo-cultural-setting novels and manga occasionally include dakijizou as a proper noun representing Edo sexual-vocabulary. The genealogy of modern Japanese literary tradition that begins with Nagai Kafū has repeatedly referenced the forty-eight-positions names as symbols of the pre-modern Japanese sexual-cultural register marginalised by Meiji-modernisation.

Related Terms

• Forty-eight positions (shijūhatte) — the Edo-period taxonomy that classifies dakijizou
• Ekiben (station-bento) — contemporary equivalent body-configuration name
• Shunga — the medium in which the name circulated
• Ukiyo-e — the broader pictorial tradition
• Chausu — adjacent forty-eight-position
• Matsuba-kuzushi — adjacent forty-eight-position