In late-Ming seventeenth-century Suzhou, finely coloured “spring palace pictures” were bound into small books and delivered to wealthy merchants. Around the same time in Seoul, men of the yangban class exchanged poems with gisaeng, a scene later painted in genre art. And in the same years in Edo, the publishing of shunga was beginning, opening a brilliant tradition that ran on to Hokusai and Utamaro. Three societies, sharing a Confucian patriarchal frame, were each producing different expressions of sexual culture. The histories of China, Korea, and Japan make rich material for comparative cultural history, holding both a common base and clear divergence.

The history of sexuality in East Asia compares the historical development of sexual norms, institutions, and practices across the three societies of China, the Korean peninsula, and Japan. This article covers the shared Confucian patriarchal base, China’s tradition of erotic texts, Korea’s gisaeng system, the distinctiveness of Japan, and the modernising period.

The shared Confucian patriarchal base

The largest common factor across the three was the patriarchal order rooted in the adoption of Confucianism as the basic principle of statecraft and social ethics. Patrilineal succession of house and lineage, primogeniture, male-centred allocation of social roles, and the stress on female chastity formed a normative structure running through all three.

But the depth of Confucian penetration differed. The Joseon dynasty (1392–1910) ran Confucianism as a state creed most thoroughly, with the most rigid fixing of gender roles. Ming and Qing China made it the principle of statecraft while sustaining great regional and class variety, with traditional medical thought (yin-yang theory) and Daoist views of sexual union running alongside. Japan received Confucianism as one strand of ethical thought but ran it under fusion with Shinto and Buddhism, so that Confucian rigorism never dominated society as it did in Korea or China.

This difference of depth appeared as a difference in expression. In Korea public sexual expression was strongly suppressed; in China popular erotic prints and fiction flourished; in Japan shunga and the pleasure quarters formed an openly commercial domain.

China’s tradition of erotic texts

China holds the mainstream of the East Asian erotic-text tradition. The ancient “bedchamber books,” such as the Classic of the Plain Girl, integrated yin-yang theory, the Daoist view of the body, and medical hygiene into a distinct theory of sexual union, reading male-female union as an exchange of qi and teaching moderate intercourse for longevity, a system separate from that of the Indian Kāma Sūtra.

Tang tales, Song-Yuan vernacular fiction, and Ming-Qing novels include many works with sexual content. The late-Ming Jin Ping Mei and the Qing The Carnal Prayer Mat hold a place in Chinese literary history as long novels built around sexual depiction. Ming-Qing “spring palace pictures” circulated widely as publications, prized objects, and gifts. In the Jiangnan cities of the later nineteenth century, courtesan houses flourished, and the most cultivated courtesans, skilled in poetry, calligraphy, and music, mixed with literati as cultural equals.

Korea’s gisaeng system

The distinctive feature of Joseon sexual culture was the gisaeng system. The gisaeng were originally official female entertainers attending court banquets and diplomatic rites, highly trained in song, dance, poetry, calligraphy, and painting. Only yangban men could associate with them formally; sexual contact was officially taboo but in practice frequent. The double structure of “chastity” demanded of the wife and “refinement” sought from the gisaeng typifies Joseon sexual norms.

The hierarchy of principal wife and concubine was stricter than in China or Japan. The sons of concubines faced institutionalised discrimination, restricted from the civil examinations and official careers. This structure was dismantled in stages through the late-nineteenth-century opening and the twentieth-century colonial period.

The distinctiveness of Japan

Japan’s sexual culture diverged furthest from Confucian rigorism among the three. The Heian base of visiting marriage and polygyny, Shinto’s celebration of life, Buddhist chigo culture, and the early-modern licensed system, shunga, and male-love culture developed a tradition of openly commercialising and culturalising the sexual sphere.

Chinese and Korean Confucians criticised Japanese sexual custom as “barbarian.” Some Edo Confucian scholars tried to reorder Japanese custom on Confucian lines, but they were swept aside by commercial development. Conversely, Japanese sexual culture, which struck Chinese and Korean observers as strange (the volume of shunga, the institutional development of the quarters, the openness of male love), was recorded with curiosity in the writings of Ming-Qing Chinese intellectuals and Joseon envoys.

The modernising period

From the later nineteenth into the early twentieth century, the three societies reorganised their sexual law by importing Western modern law. Japan rebuilt licensed prostitution in the Meiji period; the Republic of China intermittently attempted reform of traditional custom; colonial Korea (1910–1945) had Japanese-style licensed prostitution introduced.

After the Second World War, Japan abolished licensed prostitution with the Anti-Prostitution Law (1956); mainland China rapidly dismantled it after 1949 through forced rehabilitation; Taiwan and South Korea moved toward abolition in stages. The differences in postwar sexual policy are tied closely to each society’s postwar order (socialist, liberal, postcolonial).

See also

• Sexual culture of ancient Rome
• History of sexuality in Europe
• Kāma Sūtra
• Sexuality in Buddhism and Shinto
• Sexuality in Heian Japan
• Shunga