On the second floor of a winter tenement, a shop clerk opens a booklet across his knees by the brazier. The cover is plain and unmarked; inside appear brilliantly coloured prints, men and women boldly drawn. Beside the scene is a cat that has slipped in pretending to be a guest, a caricature of a monk by the woman’s side, joking lines exchanged by the figures in the picture. The clerk bursts out laughing. This is certainly a “picture”, but it is just as much a “laugh”. When the people of Edo called shunga warai-e, the word carried exactly this sense of comedy, play and wit.

Warai-e (laughing pictures) is one of the chief Edo-period names for shunga. The name shunga spread only from the Meiji period; in the Edo period warai-e, makura-e (pillow pictures), enpon (erotic books), higi-ga (secret-play pictures) and wa-jirushi coexisted. The sense of “laughter” implied not only sexual content but parody, comedy, wit and play, an important clue to the basic character of early-modern shunga culture. This article covers the history of the terms, the aesthetic sense that “laughter” implied, representative painters’ works, and the modern shift of vocabulary.

Overview

Early-modern Japanese shunga held a cultural position unlike the “pornography” or “obscene picture” suggested by modern Japanese. The name warai-e shows this early-modern character most plainly. The word “laughter” was used in two senses at once: the easing of sexual excitement with laughter, and the creative attitude of weaving comedy and parody into a sexual scene. The Edo painter and reader laughed while looking at shunga and felt desire while laughing, enjoying both at the same time as a shared sense.

From the Meiji period, as the Western concept of “pornography” was imported and the relation of sexual expression to the public sphere was reordered, native names such as warai-e and makura-e faded and the modern shunga settled as the official name. This was not a mere change of term but an event marking the shift of society’s attitude toward sexual expression.

The Edo-period naming system

In the Edo period several names coexisted for pictures and books of sexual subject. Warai-e was one of the most common, a colloquial name widely used among Edo townsmen, the character for “laugh” carrying both a sexual and a comic sense. Makura-e (pillow pictures) implied viewing and use in the bedroom; there was a custom of placing pillow-picture albums in the newlyweds’ room as a sex-education book or as a piece of the bridal trousseau. Enpon denoted a book containing sexual scenes, used mostly of picture-led rather than text-led publications. Higi-ga was a more elegant expression, common in literary and intellectual usage, the character for “secret” stressing the not-public, inner-circle enjoyment. Wa-jirushi was trade slang of booksellers and publishers, taking the first sound “wa” of “laugh” as a code for shunga in stock-keeping and circulation.

These names were not strictly distinguished but used by context, clientele and format: warai-e most colloquial and popular, higi-ga most literary and cultivated, makura-e and enpon intermediate and practical. In Edo publishing the choice of title and name was also a commercial strategy. The major publishers built the words “laugh”, “charm” and “pillow” into their titles by readership. Works titled with “laugh” tended to be popular pieces stressing the union of laughter and sex, while works with “pillow”, such as Utamaro’s Utamakura (1788), were positioned as upper-class large-format colour luxury goods.

What “laughter” implied

A key feature of early-modern shunga is the weaving of varied parody and comedy into sexual scenes. One element is the picture-within-a-picture and the contrast image: a comic scene, a classical-literary scene or a kabuki scene set beside the act, so the viewer enjoyed reading the parallel cultural context. Another is the comic line: the words from the figures’ mouths were often not realistic but puns, wordplay and comic exchanges, using the slang and catchwords of the day. A third is the caricaturing of the body: the exaggerated depiction of genitals, the abnormal arrangement of body parts and exchanges with animals, departures from realism taken up actively. What looks “comic” or “cartoonish” today was valued in the Edo period as the expression of entertainment and play.

The cultural position of early-modern shunga is important: it was not pushed wholly into the “secret” zone but was part of the public entertainment of the townsman class. The gift of pillow pictures at marriage, the celebration of a merchant branch-opening, and the warrior’s good-luck charm at the front, shunga was held to be a token of “long martial fortune”, were broad public and semi-public uses. The name warai-e fits this public, recreational position: framing sexual content as “laughter” justified its circulation in public settings and gave the viewer the distance of “this is play, this is comic”. In warrior society shunga was treated as a good-luck charm of long martial fortune, slipped inside helmet or armour at the front, resting on a folk idea that tied sexual excitement to the energy of “fire” and “yang” as a symbol of vitality on the battlefield.

Main painters and works

Hishikawa Moronobu (d. 1694) played the decisive role in establishing early-modern shunga. Active in the Genroku era, he developed shunga from painting toward the printed book and colour print; his Koi no mutsugoto shijūhatte (c. 1685) systematised the positions into forty-eight types and established the later type, with its weight on the surrounding setting. Suzuki Harunobu (c. 1725–1770) established colour printing in the Meiwa era and applied it to shunga; his work, delicate and elegant with classical quotation, assumed a cultivated readership, and Fūryū enshoku mane’emon (1770) is known for the conceit of a tiny “bean man” observing others’ acts. Kitagawa Utamaro (1753–1806) formed the peak in the Kansei era; his Utamakura (1788) and Ehon warai-jōgo (1803), with their delicate depiction of women’s expression and bold compositional economy, are held among the world’s masterpieces, closely tied to the courtesan culture of Yoshiwara. Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849) made shunga in the Bunka-Bunsei era; his “Octopus and the Diver” (in Kinoe no komatsu, 1814) is among the world’s most famous shunga, fantastic and grotesque, opening a realm beyond realism. From the Bunka-Bunsei into the Tenpō era Keisai Eisen, Utagawa Kunisada and Utagawa Kuniyoshi mass-produced shunga, showing that warai-e was not mere obscene picture but part of the synthetic achievement of early-modern art.

The modern shift of vocabulary

From the Meiji period, public attitudes to sexual expression changed greatly. The government, to keep the image of a “civilised nation”, made shunga an object of control as “obscene picture” and strictly limited its publication; the revision of the publishing ordinance from 1887 and the 1907 enactment of Penal Code Article 175 made production and circulation legally difficult. In this process the native names (warai-e, makura-e, enpon) faded and shunga settled as the scholarly and official name. The character for “spring” carried a sexual implication while bringing a Sinitic, Confucian distance, fitting the modern intellectual discourse. Shunga was itself already used in the Edo period, not a Meiji invention; what Meiji did was to select shunga among several names and marginalise the rest.

The name warai-e survived colloquially in part into the Taishō period but nearly vanished from print and public discourse, its popular, vernacular sense out of keeping with the modern concepts of “art” and “cultural property”. After the war, especially in the shunga re-evaluation from the 1990s, warai-e drew attention again as a scholarly term: where the distinctiveness of Edo shunga culture (laughter, comedy, play) is stressed, warai-e is sometimes preferred to shunga. In overseas reception the Japanese shunga settled as the international art term; warai-e is occasionally mentioned in scholarly papers but has not settled as a general overseas name.

Cultural-historical significance

The name warai-e is an important clue to the distinctiveness of early-modern Japanese sexual-expression culture. That the character for “laugh” held both a sexual and a comic sense shows that early-modern shunga was not shut into the frame of the “obscene” and “secret” but unfolded in the realm of “laughter”, “play” and “culture”. The modern shift of vocabulary (warai-e to shunga) marks the reordering of the relation between sexual expression and the public sphere, the compound work of the Meiji civilisation policy, the enactment of Article 175 and the import of the modern art concept, by which the varied early-modern naming system converged into the single shunga. The recent re-evaluation, the 2013 British Museum exhibition and the 2015–16 Eisei Bunko exhibition, is significant as a modern rediscovery of early-modern warai-e culture. This article treats warai-e not as a mere “old name for shunga” but as an important historical term preserving a distinctive early-modern sense.

See also

• Shunga
• History of shunga
• Ukiyo-e
• Yoshiwara
• Kuruwa (pleasure quarter)
• Edo sexual culture