Shijuhatte (四十八手, “the forty-eight hands”) is the general term for the system of forty-eight-odd sexual positions and techniques codified in the Edo period. The name borrows the count used for sumo winning moves. Taking Hishikawa Moronobu’s Forty-Eight Hands of Love’s Whispers (1670s) as its starting point, it worked as a classificatory frame for positions within the realm of erotic books and shunga, and it left a typological framework on early-modern and later Japanese sexual representation that is still referenced in contemporary erotic culture.

Overview

Shijuhatte is an early-modern Japanese system of position classification that gives proper names to differences in bodily arrangement, motion, and contact during intercourse and sorts them into roughly forty-eight entries. Each position carries its own name, “chausu,” “matsubakuzushi,” “kannon-biraki,” “honte” among them, and each was depicted as a subject in shunga and described in detail in the prose of erotic books.

The number “forty-eight” is not an exact count but a symbolic numeral modelled on the traditional count of sumo winning moves. The actual number of positions varies from edition to edition, some falling short of forty-eight, some exceeding fifty, some incorporating supplementary chapters to surpass a hundred. Hayashi’s Studies in Edo Erotic Books positions the term as “a general signboard expression for position picture-catalogues in Edo erotic books.”

Shijuhatte was more than a mere catalogue of positions. Each position carried literary and humorous connotations and circulated as material for waka, haikai, and senryu. It is a representative case showing how Edo sexual culture functioned as a playful art continuous with “laughter pictures,” wedding ritual, and the culture of the pleasure quarters.

Etymology

“Forty-eight hands” was originally the general term for sumo winning moves. In the Japanese sumo tradition the figure was long used as the symbolic count of winning moves, and from the Muromachi period sumo manuals established a classification assigning twelve moves each to throws, pulls, twists, and back-bends. With the flourishing of Edo sumo culture the term spread widely and was borrowed into other fields.

The application of the name to sexual technique is conventionally traced to Moronobu’s shunga catalogue Forty-Eight Hands of Love’s Whispers (around the 1670s). Modelling intercourse positions on the count of sumo moves is a humorous operation that sets the systematisation of martial technique alongside the gestures of lovemaking, expressing the playful worldview of early-modern Japan succinctly. Similar borrowings appear in “the forty-eight hands of drinking” (etiquette at the cup) and “the forty-eight hands of commerce” (merchants’ bargaining); “forty-eight hands” had become general rhetoric for the systematic enumeration of any art or skill.

English has no term directly corresponding to shijuhatte; modern translations most often render it literally as forty-eight hands or forty-eight positions. The system arose largely independently of the position classifications found in the Chinese sex manuals Sunu jing and Yufang bijue, and any resemblance to India’s Kama Sutra remains, as discussed below, merely formal.

History

Moronobu and the formation of the forty-eight hands

The first to present the system explicitly under the name “forty-eight hands” was the early-Edo painter Hishikawa Moronobu (1618–1694). His Forty-Eight Hands of Love’s Whispers drew each position as a single image with a short caption, a catalogue-form erotic book that became the authority for the forty-eight hands in later erotic books. Moronobu had produced many erotic books before it, and he is thought to have fixed the very form of the position picture-catalogue in the nascent ukiyo-e period.

Moronobu’s forty-eight hands already contain names that form the core of the later set: honte (the face-to-face frontal type), chausu (the face-to-face mounted type), matsubakuzushi, the “weir,” the “net-pull,” the “standing flower-diamond,” the “rear-take,” the “treasure ship,” and the “Daruma turn-over.” The names draw on diverse sources, natural objects (pine needle, treasure ship), sumo moves, clothing and tools (net, weir), and emotions (longing, neck-pull), favouring humorous variety over any single consistent naming principle.

Development through Harunobu, Utamaro, Hokusai, and Kunisada

After Moronobu, the forty-eight hands became a subject the major Edo ukiyo-e masters returned to repeatedly. Suzuki Harunobu (1725–1770), Torii Kiyonaga (1752–1815) in Sode no Maki (1785), Kitagawa Utamaro (1753–1806) in Utamakura (1788), Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849) in Kinoe no Komatsu (1814), and Utagawa Kunisada (1786–1865) all placed forty-eight-hands positions at the core of their late-early-modern erotic books.

The pictorial treatment differs greatly by artist. Utamaro extravagantly idealised the expression, hair, and costume of the receiving partner, using each position as a display stage for an ideal of the female body. Hokusai stressed the geometric composition of bodily arrangement, decoratively organising the lines of body, costume, sliding door, and tatami within the frame. Kunisada strengthened group composition and narrative, producing many multi-figure erotic books on the theme. Hayashi’s Studies in Edo Erotic Books analyses these artist-by-artist pictorial differences in detail.

Santo Kyoden and transfer to the sharebon

By the Kansei era (1789–1801) the term crossed beyond erotic books into the sharebon (conversational fiction set in the pleasure quarters). Santo Kyoden’s Keiseikai Shijuhatte (1790) narrates the bargaining between customer and courtesan in the quarters within the frame of “forty-eight hands,” where “hand” denotes not intercourse positions but the customer’s strategy and the courtesan’s technique of reception. This transfer is a fine example of how, in the Edo period, “forty-eight hands” circulated widely as rhetoric for “the systematic enumeration of any art.”

Marginalisation in the late Tokugawa and Meiji

From the late Tokugawa into the early Meiji period, the inflow of Victorian Western sexual norms and stronger publication controls rapidly marginalised the production of erotic books and shunga. The 1875 publication regulations and the 1880 codification of the offence of distributing obscene matter drove forty-eight-hands erotic books underground, and from the modern period they survived as objects for the antiquarian market and collectors. In Meiji and Taisho sex education and medical translation, modern terms such as “face-to-face missionary,” “woman-on-top,” and “side position” occupied the academic context, and “forty-eight hands” was marginalised as classical, popular vocabulary.

The naming system and classification

Among the forty-eight hands frequent in Edo erotic books are: honte (the face-to-face frontal type, ancestor of the modern missionary position); chausu (the face-to-face mounted type, equivalent to the modern woman-on-top); matsubakuzushi (a side-position form raising one of the receiving partner’s legs high); kannon-biraki (a face-to-face type spreading both legs wide); the “weir” (legs intertwined); the “net-pull” (the inserting partner drawing the other’s hips in); the “standing flower-diamond” (a standing position); the “rear-take” (a rear-entry type); the “Daruma turn-over” (laying the receiving partner on the back with both legs raised); the “neck-pull longing” (a close type with both touching at the neck); and the “treasure ship” (both lying side by side).

These names derive from many sources, natural objects, tools, gestures, emotions, architecture, plants, and cannot be reduced to a single naming principle. Hayashi calls this “the playful-art quality of naming in Edo erotic books.” Modern researchers have tried to classify the positions systematically by geometric features of bodily arrangement, along axes such as the relation of the body axes (facing, rear, side, reversed), the up-down relation (inserting partner above, receiving partner above, or equal), posture (lying, sitting, standing, squatting), and direction of motion. But because Edo naming does not unambiguously reflect kinesiological features, a complete correspondence with modern position classification is difficult. The same position is sometimes called by different names in different books, and the same name sometimes denotes different positions.

Visual expression in shunga

Shunga was the medium that developed the positions of the forty-eight hands most richly: in the catalogue form of one image per position, in the group form placing several positions in one frame, and in the narrative form embedding the positions within a story scene. Utamaro’s Utamakura (1788) is regarded as the summit of forty-eight-hands erotic books, with costume, hair, accessories, and background rendered in minute detail and the spoken words of the figures written into the frame, integrating dialogue, jokes, and humour with the image. The “octopus and the diver” in Hokusai’s Kinoe no Komatsu gained independent fame as a fantastical position departing from the frame, though the book as a whole includes a systematic development of the forty-eight hands.

The forty-eight-hands shunga served not only to arouse but also as marriage-trousseau pictures with a wedding-ritual function, as charms against fire and for martial fortune, and as festive objects for a merchant house’s storehouse opening. The presence of these festive and apotropaic functions grounds the placement of the forty-eight hands as a cultural system beyond a mere “catalogue of positions.”

Later influence

In the Meiji and Taisho periods the term survived in the antiquarian market and popular custom magazines, and it was repeatedly taken up in postwar sex-advice books and weekly feature articles. From the late Showa into the Heisei era, against the rise of Edo-culture studies and shunga exhibitions, the forty-eight hands again drew attention as an object of scholarly research; Shirakura’s How to Look at Shunga (2008) is a representative work explaining the frame plainly to modern readers.

In contemporary adult moving-image works the names of the forty-eight hands have largely been replaced by modern terms such as “missionary,” “woman-on-top,” and “rear-entry,” but in concept works and period-drama-style works the classical names such as “chausu” and “matsubakuzushi” are sometimes referenced as proper names. Edo erotic-book position images are also used as compositional references in gravure, doujinshi, and adult manga. In literature too, the forty-eight hands have been referenced repeatedly as a symbol of Edo culture, and in contemporary subculture, period fiction, historical manga, and history essays the name “the Edo forty-eight hands” appears frequently as a symbolic sign of early-modern Japanese sexual culture.

International comparison

India’s classic Kama Sutra (compiled around the second to fourth centuries) is known, like the forty-eight hands, as a text systematically classifying erotic technique. The two share the treatment of love as an object of systematic description, but they differ importantly. The Kama Sutra situates sexuality within the religious-philosophical scheme of the four aims of life in the Brahmanical worldview, whereas the forty-eight hands is a secular position catalogue formed within the playful-art culture of early-modern Japan. The Kama Sutra is a comprehensive treatise covering not only positions but courtship, marriage, and the discussion of courtesans, whereas the forty-eight hands is a frame specialised in position classification. And the Kama Sutra is a text-centred original without images, whereas pictorialisation by painters is an essential component of the forty-eight hands. Hayashi and others hold that there was probably no direct relation of influence, and that the cultural orientation toward systematising erotic technique arose independently as a parallel phenomenon in each civilisation.

The Chinese arts-of-the-bedchamber texts, tied to nourishing-life thought, contain position classifications such as the nine methods and the thirty methods and may have flowed into Japan before the forty-eight hands took form, but a direct connection to the forty-eight-hands frame has not been sufficiently established. The conventional view understands the Edo forty-eight hands as a distinctively Japanese system that arose independently in the confluence of sumo culture and erotic-book culture.

See also

• Shunga
• Chausu
• Woman-on-top (kijoui)
• Matsubakuzushi
• Kannon-biraki
• Missionary position (seijoui)