We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: we think shunga, erotic woodblock prints, are one of the most impressive and significant parts of Japanese historical culture, and that the government should be singing its praises from the rooftops, instead of trying to hide them and keep people from seeing them under threat of prosecution.
Fortunately, we are no longer alone. Shunga has achieved global success, not least in the form of a very successful art exhibition in Britain in 2013, which belatedly came to Japan in 2015 and attracted huge crowds.
Money talks. Organizers now can point to the 200,000 people who visited the first shunga exhibition in Tokyo and the overseas fame to justify what they are doing. There have been subsequent exhibitions.
But why should shunga be relegated even just to art museums?
Generally, the police turn a blind eye to full-fontal nudity if it’s in the name of “culture,” though full-frontal nudity is still rare in cinema and TV because it’s too much of a risk to test that qualification.
The erotic prints have been around since the Heian period and reached their apogee in the Edo era. Almost all the artists who made the woodblock prints we so love and which are still such a major part of Japanese visual culture also dabbled in shunga.
They weren’t just pornography for men either, but consumed readily by men and women, young and old.
Their absence from the public sphere in Japan today is an anomaly of modern times.
Things are slowly changing, and Hokusai’s unique vision of tentacle sex is now yours to wear on your feet.
Finally, shunga are now set to appear in an uncensored form in a Japanese feature film for the very first time.
Shunga Sensei will be released in Japan from October 13, starring Seiyo Uchino as a researcher specializing in erotica (the titular shunga sensei).
Details are scarce but it is written and directed by Akihiko Shiota. The protagonist’s student is played by a relatively unknown actress called Kana Kita.
We should stress it is not a sexploitation film but a “serious” movie, and the first ever in Japan to show shunga without any kind of censorship over the images. We hope it’s the first of many!
