Warning: This post is NOT safe for work!
— Donny Kimball
If you’ve spent any time delving into the dark recesses of the intrawebz, you’ve probably stumbled across that woodblock print of a Japanese woman being pleasured by none other than an octopus (two, actually). Yup, you read that right. In The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife, Katsushika Hokusai depicts a young ama diver entwined sexually with a pair of octopuses. Part of a three-volume book of erotica first published in 1814, this bizarre masterpiece, if you can even call it that, is the best-known work from a subcategory of woodblock prints called Shunga. It’s probably already too late, but at the risk of sounding like Captain Obvious, this article is not going to be safe for work. Don’t be a dummy and read it on your company PC!
So, what even IS Shunga? Literally translating to “spring pictures,” Shunga refers to a broad genre of Japanese erotic art that appeared in paintings, woodblock prints, and illustrated books. The subject matter ranged from encounters between men and women to same-sex relationships and other more imaginative scenarios, including the sort of tentacled insanity Hokusai cooked up. Major artists produced it, audiences consumed it, and the genre developed over centuries into a varied body of work. Some of it was humorous, some fantastical, and plenty of it was far more explicit than you might expect. The aforementioned octopus scene is just the example that somehow escaped into the wider internet.
What the internet version of Shunga tends to obscure is just how much of it there was. During the Edo period (1603–1868), erotic images were produced in large quantities, appearing in everything from relatively inexpensive printed books to far more elaborate painted handscrolls. Readers could encounter domestic scenes, fantasy, parody, literature, fashion, jokes, and everyday life right alongside the considerably more obvious bits. That range matters because the surviving image most people know is so aggressively weird that it can make the entire genre look like one long parade of tentacles. Hokusai’s octopuses were memorable, but they were never the whole picture.
That breadth also creates an obvious modern question: are we basically talking about Japanese pornography here? The images can be sexually explicit, some were clearly meant to be erotic, and the absurdly oversized genitalia that became one of the genre’s trademarks wasn’t exactly striving for anatomical realism. The temptation is to reach for the nearest modern label and move on, but we’ll leave that verdict hanging for the moment. Before we decide what to call Shunga, we need to understand where it came from and how it became so widespread. Then we can come back to how people under Tokugawa rule viewed and used these images.
And here’s where things get even more interesting: none of this suddenly appeared during Hokusai’s lifetime. The roots of Japanese erotic imagery stretch back centuries before the great ukiyo-e masters started designing their decidedly NSFW images for woodblock printing. Earlier paintings, illustrated scrolls, imported ideas from China, and the tastes of Japan’s aristocratic classes all helped shape what would eventually become Shunga. By the time commercial print culture took off, the genre had developed into the form most people recognize today, but its story begins much earlier than that. So, before we get to Hokusai and his amorous cephalopods again, we need to rewind the clock.
The History of Shunga
Long before artists like Hokusai started turning Shunga into elaborate woodblock prints, Japan already had a long tradition of erotic imagery. Narrative works centered on sexual themes survive from the medieval period, while earlier precedents stretch back at least to the late Heian period (794–1185). At first, this kind of material circulated largely among courtly, military, and religious elites, with the mass audience coming later. One particularly important example is Chigo Soshi, an early 14th-century illustrated scroll depicting sexual relationships between Buddhist monks and chigo, or young temple attendants. In other words, Shunga had quite a head start on ukiyo-e.
Things changed dramatically with the rise of commercial woodblock printing during the early years of Tokugawa rule. By the late 17th century, artists such as Hishikawa Moronobu were producing erotic print series and illustrated books that could be reproduced in far greater numbers than a painted handscroll. That shift helped move erotic art beyond the relatively limited circles that had traditionally commissioned or collected it. Shunga became increasingly intertwined with ukiyo-e, the wider “floating world” culture of actors, courtesans, fashion, and urban entertainment. Publishers now had a format they could sell to a much broader audience, and erotic imagery became part of that expanding commercial print culture.
Once Shunga entered that commercial print culture, it absolutely took off. Thousands of designs were produced in books, albums, individual prints, and still-luxurious painted scrolls. Publishers sold them through ordinary commercial channels, while traveling lending libraries helped put erotic books into the hands of readers who did not necessarily need to buy their own copies. The subject matter expanded right along with the market, ranging from familiar domestic encounters to same-sex relationships, fantasy, parody, and scenes drawn from literature. By this point, Shunga occupied a substantial place in Japan’s popular visual culture, with enough demand to support an enormous range of erotic material.
By the 18th and early 19th centuries, Shunga had reached the height of its popularity. Artists and publishers produced increasingly elaborate books, albums, and prints, often with an extraordinary level of technical refinement. Government restrictions periodically narrowed what could be published openly, yet the genre continued to circulate and evolve. Shunga was firmly established as a major commercial category within Japanese print culture. The censorship story gets complicated enough to deserve its own section, so we’ll leave the government out of the bedroom for a moment and stick with how the genre itself developed.
That long run began to change with the Meiji period (1868–1912). As Japan rapidly modernized and reworked its laws and public institutions, attitudes toward explicit imagery hardened, and material that had circulated widely under the shogunate was increasingly treated as obscene. Shunga’s public status shifted from widespread popular media to something more closely associated with embarrassment, taboo, and illegality, while the production of new works declined. The pictures themselves survived, but the social world that had produced and consumed them changed almost completely. Which raises the obvious question: when we look back at Shunga today, are we really just looking at old Japanese pornography?
Was Shunga Proto Pornography
So, was Shunga basically pornography for people living under Tokugawa rule? Well, yes and no. If we’re talking about sexually explicit material designed at least partly to turn people on, then Shunga checks that box pretty decisively. A lot of it created an idealized fantasy world where sex was plentiful, bodies behaved however the artist needed them to, and seemingly everyone involved was having a fantastic time. The modern label still creates problems, though, because pornography is only one part of how these works functioned. To understand the gap, we have to look at what people at the time were doing with the images beyond the obvious.
For starters, Shunga was frequently funny. One contemporary term for erotic pictures was warai-e, literally “pictures for laughter,” and plenty of works leaned heavily into parody, ridiculous situations, dirty jokes, and exaggerated anatomy. People could look at these images together, discuss them, and enjoy them as entertainment, which puts some distance between Shunga and the lonely 18th-century equivalent of incognito mode. The humor was often just as deliberate as the eroticism. Even some of the more outrageous sexual scenarios make more sense when you realize the artist was trying to get a laugh as well as a rise.
Shunga could also serve practical purposes. Historical sources indicate that erotic books and paintings sometimes formed part of a bride’s trousseau, essentially giving newlyweds a visual introduction to sex. Within Shunga itself, couples are occasionally shown looking at erotic pictures together as part of foreplay or using them as guides to different positions. Other works mixed the fantasy with advice about sexual health, techniques, toys, and pleasure. Taken together, those uses gave Shunga more cultural territory than the modern pornography label tends to capture, even if getting people turned on was clearly part of the equation.
Just as importantly, Shunga circulated among different social classes and was consumed by both men and women. The scenes themselves could depict married couples, Yoshiwara courtesans, adulterous affairs, male-male relationships, and all sorts of other combinations. Some of those relationships were understood very differently in the society that produced these works than they would be in modern Japan or the West. Shunga was erotic entertainment, but people could also encounter it as humor, instruction, fantasy, and art. Its enormous popularity eventually ran straight into the Tokugawa government’s repeated attempts to regulate what people could publish.
Why Shunga Was Banned
The Tokugawa government’s attempts to control Shunga were part of a much broader effort to regulate publishing. The Tokugawa shogunate had been policing printed material since the 17th century, with a 1661 edict already targeting erotic books alongside works considered politically troublesome. Things got more serious in 1722 during the Kyoho Reforms under shogun Tokugawa Yoshimune. New publishing regulations specifically ordered erotic books to be inspected and withdrawn from circulation on the grounds that they were harmful to public morals. From that point on, commercially printed Shunga was officially operating outside the rules, even though demand for it never went away.
The Kyoho Reforms also reached well beyond sex. They tightened government control over an increasingly large commercial publishing industry and reinforced the social hierarchy on which Tokugawa rule depended. Books touching on current affairs, the ruling family, or material seen as disrespectful toward class distinctions could also land publishers in trouble. Nishikawa Sukenobu’s Hyakunin Joro Shina-sadame, for example, was censored shortly after the reforms despite not being primarily erotic. The commonly given explanation is that presenting women from radically different social positions within the same work risked blurring distinctions the government was trying to maintain.
Of course, telling people they weren’t allowed to publish Shunga didn’t magically make everyone stop wanting it. Printed erotic works moved underground, and publishers continued moving books through channels that avoided government approval. Records from publishing guilds repeatedly warning members not to sell the material suggest that enforcement was an ongoing battle. Production never really stopped, and Shunga continued circulating despite the official prohibition. The government could make erotic publishing riskier and force it out of the open, but demand remained. The ban changed the conditions of the market without wiping that market away.
That persistence is important because the word “banned” makes the policy sound cleaner than it was in practice. The Tokugawa shogunate continued periodically tightening censorship, including during later reform movements, while publishers and buyers kept the genre alive. The restrictions changed how Shunga was produced and sold more than they changed the underlying appetite for it. By the time we reach the artists behind the images, that continuing market becomes impossible to miss. The people designing these works included some of the biggest names in Japanese woodblock printing, and their involvement tells us a lot about where Shunga sat within the art world.
Famous Artists Who Made Shunga
If you’re picturing Shunga as the work of some horny old dude sitting in a back room sketching dirty pictures, that’s probably the biggest misconception we’ve got left to kill. Shunga was produced by many of the same professional artists responsible for the ukiyo-e masterpieces hanging in museums around the world today. There was a huge commercial market for erotic books and prints, and accomplished artists worked wherever there was demand. Shunga sat alongside beautiful women, kabuki actors, landscapes, warriors, and scenes from everyday life as one more subject a successful woodblock artist might take on.
Some of the biggest names of the 18th century produced major Shunga works. Suzuki Harunobu, one of the pioneers of full-color nishiki-e printing, created an important erotic series called Furyu Enshoku Mane’emon. Torii Kiyonaga produced the celebrated Sode-no-Maki, while Kitagawa Utamaro created numerous erotic books and albums, including Utamakura in 1788. Kitagawa Utamaro illustrated close to 100 books in total, and more than 30 of those were erotic. That is a substantial share of the output of one of ukiyo-e’s most famous artists, which tells you just how seriously major artists could engage with Shunga.
Then you’ve got Katsushika Hokusai, who we’ve obviously already met thanks to his rather enthusiastic octopuses. The 19th century brings plenty of other heavyweights too. Utagawa Kunisada produced elaborate Shunga books and preparatory drawings, while Utagawa Kuniyoshi regularly designed erotic works alongside the warrior prints and fantastical images for which he’s better remembered today. Hishikawa Moronobu, Katsukawa Shunsho, Katsukawa Shuncho, Keisai Eisen, and plenty of other important ukiyo-e artists also got in on the action. Basically, start digging through the history of Japanese woodblock printing and an awful lot of familiar names eventually turn up with their pants down.
Censorship does make the picture a little murkier because artists increasingly stopped signing Shunga openly after the Tokugawa government began cracking down on erotic publishing. Some works were anonymous, others appeared under pseudonyms, and attribution can therefore get complicated. The finished works could involve sophisticated compositions, expensive pigments, skilled carving, elaborate printing techniques, and some of the finest artists of the Edo period. That level of craft fits what we’ve already seen about the genre’s popularity and commercial reach. Shunga belonged to the professional world of ukiyo-e, even when the government preferred that everyone involved keep their names off the page.
Where to See Shunga Today
For something that was once produced and consumed on such an enormous scale, seeing genuine Shunga in a Japanese museum is surprisingly difficult. Plenty of major museums own erotic prints, books, and paintings, but they’re rarely part of permanent displays. For much of the modern era, Shunga remained stuck in an awkward position where scholars recognized its artistic importance while museums were understandably nervous about putting giant genitalia on the gallery walls. That began changing only recently. In fact, Japan’s first full-scale museum exhibition devoted to Shunga didn’t happen until 2015, which is pretty wild considering people had been making the stuff for centuries.
That landmark exhibition opened at Tokyo’s Eisei Bunko Museum in September 2015, following the hugely successful Shunga: Sex and Pleasure in Japanese Art exhibition at the British Museum two years earlier. Even then, getting the Japanese show off the ground wasn’t easy. Organizers reportedly approached numerous museums before finding one willing to host it, with concerns surrounding obscenity laws and the lingering stigma attached to Shunga making institutions hesitant. Eisei Bunko finally took the plunge, restricted admission to adults, and drew enormous crowds. The exhibition later traveled to Kyoto’s Hosomi Museum in 2016, helping crack open a door that had remained shut for a long time.
Right now, one of the best opportunities to see Shunga in Japan is at the Fukuda Art Museum in Kyoto’s Arashiyama district. Running from September 19, 2026 through January 17, 2027, Forms of Love: Legendary Shunga Scroll Chigo Soshi on Display is the museum’s first exhibition dedicated to Shunga. Its centerpiece is the public debut of Chigo Soshi, an early 14th-century scroll the museum considers the oldest surviving Shunga in Japan. The exhibition also includes Tani Buncho’s copy of Koshibagaki Zoshi, hand-painted Shunga by Tsukioka Settei, and Hokusai’s Nami Chidori. Admission is limited to visitors aged 18 and over.
If you miss that exhibition, however, all is not lost. Shunga exhibitions now pop up periodically in Japan, particularly at smaller museums, private collections, and temporary exhibition spaces, so it’s worth checking what’s running before your trip. That’s probably the best way to approach seeing Shunga today anyway. Keep an eye out for special exhibitions instead of expecting to walk into one of Japan’s major art museums and find an entire room full of people enthusiastically going at it. The art spent centuries circulating somewhat discreetly, and even now, apparently, you still have to know where to look.
Until next time travelers…
