At the end of the twelfth century, in a monk’s quarters of Enryaku-ji in Kyoto, the hand of a painter said to be the priest Toba slid a brush across silk, drawing a caricature of a monk clutching an exaggerated phallus. It was at once a comic affront to the precepts and an echo of a folk sense that affirmed the root of life with laughter. Some six hundred years later, in front of an Edo publisher’s shop, monochrome erotic books cut by Hishikawa Moronobu were stacked and passed from townsman to townsman. Two hundred years on, in 1945, the fires of the Tokyo air raids burnt to ash, in a single night, an enormous material trace of Edo culture, including printing blocks and painted shunga. This article traces, period by period, this long wave of birth, flourishing, loss and rediscovery.

The history of shunga is the temporal development of shunga, the painting of sexual subjects in Japan. It runs from the late-Heian caricature source, through the Muromachi painted handscroll, the printing of shunga by Hishikawa Moronobu in the early Edo period, the arrival of the colour-print era with Suzuki Harunobu, the peak formed by Utamaro and Hokusai, the going-underground under Meiji’s Penal Code Article 175, the physical loss in wartime, the rediscovery through Western collections, and the modern re-evaluation marked by the 2013 British Museum and 2015 Eisei Bunko exhibitions, a long path of some eight centuries.

Overview

In treating the history of shunga, the first point is that it cannot be grasped as a single-track “history of the development of an art genre”. It unfolded as a compound history in which several layers overlap: the development of style and technique, the history of political regulation and going-underground, the history of physical loss and preservation, the changing history of scholarly and public evaluation, and the history of international reception and re-import. As a working division, this article adopts eight periods: medieval prehistory (late Heian to Muromachi), early Edo (later seventeenth century, the Moronobu period), the colour-print era (later eighteenth century, Harunobu to Utamaro), the late mature period (early nineteenth century, Hokusai to Kunisada), the modern regulation period, the wartime loss, the postwar underground (1945–1990s), and the international re-evaluation (from the 2000s).

Medieval prehistory

The oldest lineage of pictorial depiction of sexual scenes in Japan goes back to the caricature of the late Heian and early Kamakura periods. The caricatures attributed to the priest Toba Sōjō Kakuyū (1053–1140), akin to the Chōjū-jinbutsu-giga of Kōzan-ji, were later called Toba-e and formed a norm of exaggeration, comedy and allegory. Toba-e itself was not centred on sexual subjects, but it already held the expressive core later inherited by shunga: the exaggeration of the phallus, the caricaturing of the body, and the stress on the comic. Among the handscrolls of the same period, some containing sexual scenes survive in fragments, treasured private pieces of great temples and high nobles, far from the later townsman shunga in circulation and social position.

In the Muromachi period the making of painted shunga continued for patrons among the nobility, the warriors and the temples; painters of the Tosa and Kanō schools handled painted shunga beside their official work. The surviving examples are limited. Shunga of this period stayed within a narrow circle of private upper-class viewing, marriage gift-giving and esoteric temple use, and had not yet reached the townsman class.

Early Edo: printing by Moronobu

In the later seventeenth century the rise of Edo townsman culture and the development of woodblock printing transformed the social position of shunga. What had been a privately treasured painted object of the upper class was now mass-reproduced as books and single sheets and circulated widely among townsmen as a popular visual commodity. The central figure of this turn was Hishikawa Moronobu (d. 1694), active in the Genroku era as a founding painter of ukiyo-e. He left many shunga in monochrome print, hand-coloured print and painting. His representative work Koi no mutsugoto shijūhatte (c. 1685), which systematised the positions of sex into forty-eight types, established the type of later shunga. Moronobu drew the cultural setting of the act, bedding, furnishings, the courtesan’s toilette, the client’s manners, more minutely than the act itself, laying the base of the “cultural-synthesis” character of shunga. His Genroku era overlapped with the flourishing of Ihara Saikaku’s townsman fiction.

The colour-print era: Harunobu and Utamaro

In 1765 the technique of full-colour woodblock printing (nishiki-e) was established in Edo around Suzuki Harunobu, realised by the improvement of the registration mechanism for overlaying multiple blocks. This leapt the expressive range of all ukiyo-e and of shunga. Harunobu’s shunga, marked by delicate figures, an elegant air and quotation from classical literature, assumed a literary, cultivated readership; his Fūryū enshoku mane’emon (1770), in which a hero shrunk to a “bean man” peeps on others’ bedrooms, is a self-referential work that narrativises the very structure of shunga viewing.

In the Kansei era Kitagawa Utamaro (1753–1806) formed the stylistic peak. His Utamakura (1788), a twelve-sheet large-format set, is held among the highest shunga in world art history for its compositional economy, the delicacy of its bodies and the depth of its psychology. Utamaro’s innovation was to focus on the woman’s emotion and psychology in the act rather than the act itself, visualising the inner life through the direction of a glance, a faint movement of the mouth, disordered hair and the expression of the fingers. His work was closely tied to the courtesan culture of Yoshiwara. Around the Kansei era, Torii Kiyonaga produced shunga with his characteristic tall eight-head beauties, and the colour-print era unfolded as a time of strong individual style.

Late mature period: Hokusai, Kunisada, Eisen

In the Bunka and Bunsei eras Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849) kept making shunga into old age. His best-known is “The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife”, the octopus-and-diver image in Kinoe no komatsu (1814): with its singular composition, its dense background and the long comic text written into the picture, it became the most internationally known shunga work, influencing European Surrealism and modern tentacle imagery. Hokusai’s shunga, fantastic and grotesque, opened a realm of imagination beyond realist depiction, a different achievement from Utamaro’s psychological realism. From the Bunka-Bunsei into the Tenpō era, Keisai Eisen (1791–1848), Utagawa Kunisada (1786–1865) and Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797–1861) mass-produced shunga, the division of labour among the Utagawa school’s pupils supporting the quantitative expansion of late shunga. The strengthened morals control of the Tenpō reforms (1841–1843) tightened the regulation of erotic books, but publishers kept producing and circulating shunga through underground networks, forming a long-term equilibrium of regulation and production.

Modern regulation: going-underground

After the Meiji Restoration of 1868, the new government, to keep the image of a “civilised nation” before the Western powers, made shunga an object of control as “obscene pictures”. The 1872 edict banning the sale of shunga, the 1882 old criminal code’s obscenity provision, and the 1907 enactment of the present Penal Code Article 175 made the production, sale and circulation of shunga legally difficult. Framed as “Westernisation”, this was in substance the forced sorting of early-modern Japan’s many-layered sexual-expression culture into the Western dichotomy of pornography and art. What had held varied names and social positions, “laughing pictures”, “pillow pictures”, erotic books, was now uniformly suppressed as “obscene”. From the Meiji into the Taishō period, amid the confusion of modernisation, large quantities of shunga passed into the hands of Western collectors such as Edmond de Goncourt and Siegfried Bing. Recognised at the time as a cultural loss, this outflow later played a decisive role in the physical preservation of shunga.

Wartime loss

The Tokyo air raids of 1945 and the raids on other cities burnt up the enormous material trace of printing blocks, paintings and books from the Edo period. The publishing districts of Kanda, Nihonbashi and Asakusa, the storehouses of publishers and private collections turned to ash in a night, and the material base of Edo culture, including shunga, took a devastating blow. Circulating underground as “secret” things under wartime regulation, shunga was not the object of public preservation and was highly vulnerable to the raids; many blocks were lost forever, and surviving works are limited to those kept as printed copies. Through the confusion of the postwar, the occupation and the high-growth period, public research and exhibition of shunga inside Japan remained extremely difficult: genitals were modified in art collections, or publication was abandoned, and domestic research depended for decades on the private effort of individual scholars.

Postwar underground: Hayashi and Shirakura

The postwar study of shunga was carried in substance by the independent scholar Hayashi Yoshikazu (1922–1999), who made the systematic study of shunga his life’s task and left the multi-volume Edo enpon shūsei (1995–96, co-edited with Shirakura Yoshihiko) and many other works. His method was comprehensive: exhaustive survey of primary materials, identification of painter, publisher and date, transcription of the inscriptions, and connection to Edo literature. The art historian Shirakura Yoshihiko (1939–2014) inherited and developed this work and took on the connection to international scholarship; his Shunga (Shinchosha, 2002) was widely read and prepared the ground for the later re-evaluation. Shirakura maintained scholarly exchange with the British Museum and was deeply involved in the preparation of the 2013 exhibition. Tanaka Yūko (b. 1952) discussed the social function of shunga, especially its reading from the women’s side, re-evaluating the sexual subjectivity of early-modern women.

International re-evaluation: the British Museum and Eisei Bunko exhibitions

From the later twentieth century, research and preservation in the major Western museums advanced steadily: the British Museum (some 2,000 works), the Museum für Völkerkunde Hamburg, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Honolulu Museum of Art and the Rijksmuseum made the Meiji-era outflow an object of scholarly arrangement. International joint research by Andrew Gerstle at SOAS, Timothy Clark at the British Museum and Aki Ishigami at Ritsumeikan established the international level of shunga scholarship through the 2000s.

The large exhibition Shunga: Sex and Pleasure in Japanese Art at the British Museum from October 2013 to January 2014 was an epochal event. Curated by Timothy Clark and gathering around 170 representative works, it established shunga’s international standing as a major field of Japanese art history, issued the catalogue now treated as the standard reference, and opened the way to later exhibition in Japan. Visitors exceeded eighty thousand. From September to December 2015, the Eisei Bunko Museum in Mejiro, Tokyo, held Japan’s first full-scale shunga exhibition, showing some 120 works, followed by a touring exhibition at Kyoto’s Hosomi Museum in early 2016. This was the first large-scale public shunga exhibition inside Japan in about 140 years since the Meiji regulation. The decision of Eisei Bunko’s chairman, the former prime minister Hosokawa Morihiro, the late Shirakura’s preparation, and the realisation at Eisei Bunko after several major museums had declined to host the show, symbolise the refracted social position of shunga in modern Japan. The combined attendance reached about 210,000.

The twenty-first century and the present of research

Since the two great exhibitions, shunga research has entered a stage of normalisation, both scholarly and social. The shunga database of Ritsumeikan’s Art Research Center and the continuing study groups of the International Ukiyo-e Society have built the scholarly base. Yet the vagueness of the obscenity concept under Penal Code Article 175 remains, and the publication and exhibition of books containing shunga still require careful handling; a not-small gap persists between the level of overseas research and domestic social reception. The history of shunga, across its long eight-century wave, has followed a compound path of birth, flourishing, suppression, loss, rediscovery and re-evaluation, a condensed record of the changing status of sexual expression in Japanese society.

See also

• Shunga
• Warai-e (laughing pictures)
• Ukiyo-e
• Edo sexual culture
• Penal Code Article 175
• Yoshiwara
• Shokushu (tentacles)