Japan’s current cause célèbre has ended in a victory for art, personal liberty and eroticism with the release of self-proclaimed “vagina” artist vagina artist Rokudenashi-ko/Megumi Igarashi from police custody. She was arrested earlier this week for using Campfire to raise funds for a project involving making a 3D printing of her own genitals.
“I have always stuck to my artistic principles,” she said. She wants to to revolutionize Japanese society’s taboos on depicting and talking about female genitals. Now she’s famous for getting arrested, perhaps she has a better chance!
It is true that sex and nudity is EVERYWHERE in Japan, but NOWHERE. Since the rice of celebrity “hair nude” photo books over two decades ago some attitudes started to change and a few mainstream films escaped the censor if the full-frontal nudity was for comedic purposes.
However, even photographers as prominent as Leslie Kee have been arrested for daring to show full nudity in art exhibits. If you are gay or female, you face repression, it seems!
While the pixellation censorship is one aesthetic issue, the complete burying of the question of genitalia is another — as it is also links into some entrenched problems as the suppression of women in Japan.
Rokudenashi-ko/Megumi Igarashi is obviously a clever person, not another case of “wacky Japan” like some in the western media would like to patronize her as while they giggle at Japanese people. Though we also chuckled at the sheer outlandishness of her art projects at first, we applaud her stand and how she seizes on her new-found platform to bring about change.
Her artist name means “good-for-nothing-girl” and though she would seem to be a bit infantile in her obsession with “manko (pussy) art”, in fact she is bringing important issues into the public realm through her various sculptures, workshops, exhibitions, books, and stunts such as paddling in a “vagina kayak”!
After being detained on July 12th for online distribution of 3D data of her vagina, she was released on Friday night. She had emailed fans who funded her art project via Campfire with data of her vagina so they could make 3D prints of it.
“I believe this arrest was completely unjust and unreasonable,” said Igarashi.
The 42-year-old’s plight was met by consternation by feminists, art lovers and those who just like a countercultural cause. Ten police officers were sent to arrest her. Ten? What did they think, she was going to attack them with her vagina?!
The Tokyo District Court on Friday annulled her arrest and she was liberated… or at least, only so far as Japanese society is liberated in the first place!
Her cause attracted over 17,000 signatories in two days to an online petition to get her released.
“I have often wondered why Japanese TV shows edit out” slang words for vagina “like it’s the normal thing to do,” she said. ”But this is (a part of) my body, and I don’t understand why it’s considered obscene.”
“I’m fighting against a society that for some reason brands female privates as taboo,” she said.
Go girl!
