Sugimura Jihei, Lovers under a quilt with phoenix design, untitled erotic picture, mid – 1680s. Private collection, USA.
Shunga, “spring” or “pillow” pictures, the very, very explicit, erotic Japanese prints and scrolls, have now made it to the respectability of a major exhibition at the British Museum. Indeed the show reflects the important, contemporary collaborative research between British and Japanese scholars on the history, aesthetics, social meanings, and humor of this form of art. It was not always so. When an English trader brought some choice examples back to Britain in 1613, his outraged employers, the officials of the East India Company, had them burned. Puritan England was not ready for pictures of the naked coupling of men with enormous, virile members or with women equipped with fleshy, oyster-like pudenda. It was a time when (and for centuries to come) even the depiction of pubic hair was forbidden, and there is a good deal of that in shunga, too. The British Museum acquired many shunga in the nineteenth century, but along with the lewder products of ancient Greece and Rome they were closeted in the “secretum,” cabinets where obscene items were carefully locked away from the gaze of the young person, the uneducated, women, and the more irascible among the clergy. The British Museum embodied two of the great but conflicting qualities of the Victorian era: prudery and high scholarship.
In Japan itself, a consciousness of western disapproval led to the suppression of