From: Richard Sullivan (richsul@earthlink.net)
Date: 03/02/03-11:45:28 AM Z
Shannon,
Thanks, your post was very interesting.
I lived in Japan for 2 years in '61 and '62 when it still had much of the
traditional culture. The traditional and the modern was truly a strange mix
then and one very hard for a westerner to grasp.
The Pillow Books are full of symbolic cues that one has to know in order to
properly understand the images. The back of a woman's neck is extremely
erotic to the Japanese so most westerners miss that part. You will
frequently see the hair swooped up and the back of the neck taking a
prominent place in the image. Orgasm is symbolized by having the
participants toes curled.
The traditional Japanese home was often only one large room. Mother, father
and the children slept in one room. (BTW this was often the case in
colonial America as well.) Thus one can surmise that the mechanics of sex
was not a real puzzle to young children much less a bride to be. I am not
suggesting that sex was blatant and open in front of the children but it
would be quite difficult to keep it all under covers for very long. This
might also explain the tradition of being partially or fully clothed during
sex as is the case in the prints. In fact, total nudity as Shannon points
out, almost never occurs with the exception perhaps of the bath pictures.
The wood block Edo prints or Pillow Books have often been purported to be
sex education for the young bride to be. (Somehow boys learned it all by
osmosis.) Some experts have contested this interpretation and have
suggested the books were more designed to put the bride in the proper mood
for her wedding night. --- Ooops! Skuuuuze me! This runs totally counter
to the Western tradition that women are not stimulated by visual erotica.
Ok, so back to the first interpretation.
Western photographic erotica is mostly sledgehammer subtle compared to Asian.
Actually this is a hot topic currently in medicine. Go to the National
Library of Medicine at the NIH at:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?CMD=&DB=PubMed
and do a search on "women stimulation erotica" for some interesting
abstracts of clinical studies. [Adults only!] but then it is your
government publishing this stuff.<grin> Well that is for Americans it is
their government or whatever little is left to us now.
Think good.
--Dick Sullivan
P.S. I often wear a beret. Yesterday as I was getting money out of the ATM
a women waiting behind thanked me for supporting France. I was puzzled as
to the comment and it didn't connect for about 5 minutes. Actually berets
are Basque but many cultures have a similar version like the Scot's tam.
>Perhaps this extends to the business of erotica also. There was a
>tradition of Japanese erotica--I have seen reproductions of the woodblock
>prints in this genre--but the figure in Japanese art is rarely completely
>nude (that I know of). There is not a tradition, it seems, of the Art Nude
>as there is in the West and in Europe. The nudes in the contemporary
>photographs I saw were actually very beautiful, though, and not especially
>erotic. There was a rather formal portrait of a family--mother, father,
>teenaged daughter and son--but they were all nude. The parents were
>kneeling in
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