Both hands on the tatami, both legs in the air. The man tucks the woman’s ankles under his arms and enters from behind. Transposing the children’s wheelbarrow game directly into an adult pastime, the figure is among the more playful of the derived positions in Edo erotica. Oshikuruma (Japanese: 押し車, “push-cart”) occupies a place in the standing rear-entry group of the Forty-Eight Hands.

Oshikuruma is a position listed among the Forty-Eight Hands in which the receiving partner plants both hands on tatami or floor, and the inserting partner lifts both of the receiving partner’s legs to hip height and enters from behind. The name borrows directly from the two-person gymnastic game “wheelbarrow” (one person on their hands, the other holding the ankles and walking them forward), and the album figures catalogue it as a standing rear-entry variant.

Etymology

Oshikuruma originally means a hand-pushed cart or pram. In the Edo period, large carts, freight carts, and prams were collectively called oshikuruma, and the children’s “wheelbarrow” game lies on the same lineage: one child on all fours with hands on the ground, the other lifting and walking the ankles, a two-person outdoor game long established from early-modern times.

The Forty-Eight-Hands naming transposes this game’s posture directly into a sexual position, a typical Edo joking-coinage that adapts a child’s game into an adult pastime. Parallel adaptive names include daruma-gaeshi and isori (from sumo holds) and amibiki and shimekomi (from martial arts). The name and figures appear in late-Edo erotic books such as Makura Bunko and Endō Nichiya Nyohō-ki; whether the older Hishikawa Moronobu lineage (Koi no mutsugoto shijūhatte) contained an item of the same name is disputed, and the origin is estimated as mid-to-late Edo.

Movement

The basic posture has the receiving partner place both palms on tatami or floor and extend both legs toward the inserting partner in a four-limbs-distributed posture. The inserting partner stands directly behind, tucks the receiving partner’s ankles or thighs under the arms, and lifts the hips to their own hip height. The receiving partner’s body is supported at two points (the hands and the inserting partner’s arms), the abdomen held parallel to the floor.

Penetration occurs midway between the inserting partner’s standing posture and the receiving partner’s horizontal one. The angle is roughly horizontal, slightly downward, the glans rubbing the anterior (ventral) wall as it enters deeply. Because both of the inserting partner’s arms support the legs, the hands cannot reach the receiving partner’s hips or buttocks, and the rhythm is made by hip motion alone.

Maintenance is demanding. The receiving partner must hold the upper-body weight on the hands alone, testing shoulder and arm endurance; the inserting partner needs the arm strength to hold the legs. Long maintenance is difficult for both, and the albums tend to show it as a brief feature pose. Realistically, holding it lasts from tens of seconds to about a minute.

Treatment in classical sources

The oshikuruma figure is often placed in the latter half of Forty-Eight-Hands albums. The standard image shows the inserting partner upright, the receiving partner’s legs tucked under the arms, the receiving partner’s head lowered with hands planted, a non-facing composition with no gaze exchange. Verse-captions read “imitating the children’s wheelbarrow” and “valiant the figure that braces on both hands,” making the playful origin explicit to the reader. Similar compositions appear in albums by Utagawa Kunisada and Hokusai, with Hokusai stressing spatial depth by placing the geometric lines of sliding screens and tatami in the background.

Reception psychology

Oshikuruma expands the dominance-and-receptivity structure of rear-entry into three dimensions. The receiving partner supports their weight on the hands alone and cannot intervene in the rhythm with hip movement; the inserting partner places the legs entirely under control and holds full authority over the motion. This extreme imbalance of power-distribution is the position’s psychological characteristic.

At the same time, the difficulty of holding the posture brings a shared tension: the receiving partner braces on arm strength, the inserting partner holds the legs, and the act itself takes on the aspect of a test of both bodies’ capacity. For the Edo reader this playful tension matched the early-modern Japanese view of sex as “play” and “technique.”

In modern AV and adult media, oshikuruma is sometimes recreated as a variant of ekiben. Against the full lift of ekiben, oshikuruma keeps the receiving partner’s hands on the floor, so the support points are distributed and the two are clearly distinguished. Sports and cheerleading works use it to emphasise the receiving partner’s physical capability.

Variants

• Ekiben: full standing rear-entry, the receiving partner fully lifted
• Standing rear-entry (tachi-back): the receiving partner also stands on both feet
• Doggy (inu-kake): standard all-fours rear-entry, both on their knees
• Lying rear-entry (ne-back): the receiving partner prone

With its distinctive distribution of hands-on-floor and legs-lifted, oshikuruma holds a special place even within the rear-entry family: where ekiben is the “full-carry” type and tachi-back the “both-standing” type, oshikuruma is the intermediate “upper-body-shared” type.

Cultural reference

Oshikuruma is repeatedly cited in Edo erotica studies as a model case of naming that adapts a child’s game into a sexual position. Nagai Yoshio’s Shijūhatte: The Sexual Culture of the Edo Commoner groups oshikuruma, takarabune, and ōshōgi as the “adapted-children’s-game” type of Forty-Eight-Hands naming. The early-modern sensibility that read sex as a “play” continuous with children’s games shows clearly in this group. Anthropologically, whether the continuous verbalisation of children’s play and adult sexual gesture is peculiar to early-modern Japan or more universal is debated; the Kāmasūtra also has playfully named positions, suggesting the play-ludic framing of sex is a cross-civilisational tendency.

Related terms

• Ekiben
• Standing rear-entry (tachi-back)
• Doggy (inu-kake)
• Rear-entry (back position)
• Forty-Eight Hands
• Shunga