Japan's first on-screen film kiss, half hidden by an umbrella, caused a sensation
In 1946 a Japanese film showed a kiss, discreetly half-masked by an umbrella, and the country was electrified. Yet two centuries earlier, woodblock artists had produced erotic prints by the thousand, and almost every great ukiyo-e master made some. Japan's attitudes to sex have swung between openness and official prudishness for centuries.
Historians trace the difference partly to Japan never adopting the Confucian ideal of marriage, with its heavy premium on chastity. Early Shinto had no special moral code for sex and treated it as a natural pleasure. The Edo-period prints known as shunga, literally 'pictures of spring', a common euphemism, were enjoyed by rich and poor, men and women. The Tokugawa shogunate banned them as obscene in 1772, but production simply went underground, and making them did nothing to dent an artist's reputation, which is why calling shunga medieval pornography can mislead.
The geisha is a frequent source of confusion abroad. She was not a prostitute but a woman trained in music and cultivated conversation, paid to provide the social companionship that ordinary wives, confined to household work, were barred from offering. A geisha might have a patron she was intimate with, but sex was no part of the job itself.
Law has produced its own ironies. The Anti-Prostitution Law of 1956 criminalises selling sex but not buying it, and because it defines prostitution narrowly as intercourse with an unspecified person for money, many clubs offer only non-coital services. The writer Joan Sinclair remarked that the industry sells everything imaginable except sex, and it is estimated to earn 2.3 trillion yen a year. In cinema, the 1962 independent film Flesh Market is counted as the first 'pink film', a softcore genre that dominated domestic screens until home video took over in the 1980s.
Attitudes to same-sex relations shifted with modernisation. A ban on sodomy introduced in 1873 lasted only seven years before a new penal code modelled on the Napoleonic Code dropped it. More recently, the 21st-century dip in sex drive has been blamed for Japan's low birth rate and shrinking population.
Source: Sexuality in Japan
