Straddling the supine man, the woman plants one knee up with the sole pressed to the mat; the other leg stays folded beside his hip. With the raised leg she rocks her body back and forth, one leg rising vertically off the mat to cut a diagonal across the picture. Edo print-artists saw in that single raised leg the white sail of a ship crossing the Inland Sea. Hokake-chausu (Japanese: 帆かけ茶臼, “sail-rigged tea-mill”) is one of the codified forty-eight hands, a chausu (face-to-face cowgirl) variant in which the receiving partner raises one knee.

Overview

Hokake-chausu is the chausu variant in which the receiving partner, rather than kneeling on both knees, raises one knee and presses that sole flat to the mat. The inserting partner lies supine; the receiving partner straddles the hips and completes a face-to-face cowgirl coupling, then lifts one leg, raising the knee and pressing the sole to the floor. The raised leg serves as a fulcrum for the receiving partner’s hip motion and allows adjustment of the coupling angle. Hokake-chausu is a representative chausu derivative with its own name, alongside reverse chausu (rear-facing), stretched chausu, and “shower chausu,” the Edo writers giving distinct names to subtle differences in the chausu stroke.

The raised leg serves two functions: it adds the force of the knee and ankle to the hip motion as a fulcrum, and it asymmetrises the coupling angle, breaking the symmetric monotony of face-to-face cowgirl. Changing the angle of the raised leg finely controls depth and angle, making it a position that emphasises the receiving partner’s lead.

Etymology

The name fuses the sail-ship form with the chausu (face-to-face cowgirl). The sailing vessel, the core of Japanese coastal and river transport before the spread of Meiji-era steamships, symbolised the harbours of the Inland Sea, Osaka Bay, and Edo Bay and was a traditional subject of poetry and woodblock prints, recurring in Hiroshige’s Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō and One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. Edo writers, noting that the raised single leg resembled a sail, gave the chausu derivative the prefix “sail-rigged,” an aesthetic observation placing a representative scenic feature beside a sexual posture, a typical instance of the forty-eight-hands naming principle.

The word chausu (“tea-mill”) is the classical name for the face-to-face cowgirl, derived from the up-and-down symmetry of the millstone used to grind powdered tea, one of the core forty-eight-hands positions alongside the face-to-face missionary. Hokake-chausu maintains the geometry of chausu while adding the dynamic element of a one-leg-raised posture. There is no direct English idiom; modern translations render it as cowgirl with one leg up or squatting cowgirl.

History

The chausu name appears in forty-eight-hands albums from Hishikawa Moronobu’s Forty-eight Hands of Love (1670s) as a basic position at the core of the Edo repertoire. The first appearance of hokake-chausu is undated, but late-Edo albums hold a range of named chausu derivatives. Utamaro’s Utamakura (1788), Hokusai’s Kinoe no Komatsu (1814), and Kunisada’s albums feature one-leg-raised cowgirl frequently. In Utamaro the woman’s pale skin, the supple line of the raised leg, and the flow of hair and dress form the compositional axis; in Hokusai the raised leg runs as a diagonal across the picture, forming the geometric core of the composition. Keisai Eisen’s Makura Bunko (1822) includes hokake-chausu or a similar name among its chausu derivatives, treating it as a position emphasising the receiving partner’s lead.

In Edo culture the sailing ship was both a familiar everyday sight and a symbol of danger, adventure, and distance, indispensable to Inland-Sea shipping, Edo-Bay logistics, and river transport, and pervading poetry as set phrases like “white sail offshore.” From the Meiji period, with the underground status of erotic albums, the displacement of sailing ships by steamships, and the standardisation of modern medical vocabulary, the name left academic and public contexts, surviving only in literary and classical settings, the posture itself rendered as “squatting cowgirl” or “cowgirl variant.”

Kinematics

Hokake-chausu maintains the geometry of face-to-face cowgirl while adding a one-leg fulcrum. The inserting partner lies supine, legs slightly apart to admit the receiving partner; the receiving partner straddles the hips and completes the coupling, then raises one knee with the sole pressed to the mat (knee flexed roughly 60-90 degrees, sole beside the inserting partner’s hip) while the other leg stays folded on the opposite side. The freedom of hip motion increases with the added fulcrum: pressing the raised sole to the mat adds knee and ankle extension to the hip motion, generating stronger vertical, fore-aft, and rotational movement than the both-knees-down standard chausu, while the coupling angle asymmetrises with the tilt of the raised leg. The load concentrates on the raised knee and ankle, requiring sustained quadriceps and calf contraction, the higher exertion underlying the albums’ frequent emphasis on the receiving partner’s lead and activity.

Modern reception

The name is not current in adult moving-image works, but the body arrangement is frequently filmed as “raised-knee cowgirl” or “squatting cowgirl,” the raised single knee emphasising the receiving partner’s body line vertically and widely adopted as a standard cowgirl derivative. In adult manga and doujinshi the raised-leg cowgirl figures in scenes emphasising the receiving partner’s lead, the vertical line of the raised leg working as a compositional diagonal. Modern cowgirl variants divide into face-to-face (cowgirl) and rear-facing (reverse cowgirl), each developing raised-knee, both-knees-down, and squatting derivatives; hokake-chausu sits as the raised-knee derivative of face-to-face cowgirl, a case of continuity between the Edo shunga repertoire and modern adult-content positions. Unlike face-sitting, hokake-chausu keeps the centre of gravity at the hips and maintains coupling.

Related Terms

• Forty-eight hands
• Chausu
• Cowgirl (kijoui)
• Reverse cowgirl (haimen-kijoui)
• Face-sitting (ganmen-kijou)
• Shunga
• Ukiyo-e