(Part 1 of 2)

Shunga, literally 'spring pictures', is the Japanese erotic explicit art of the 17th to 19th centuries. It was much more mainstream than Western ideas of pornography, had a wide audience throughout society, and generally has a strong sense of humour and play.

This print's type is very rare, but I've found two Japanese cartoons of the same era using rape imagery in similar ways. For reasons I'll explain, the Russo-Japanese War seems to have been the perfect opportunity for this type of art: a brief window of time between shunga not commenting explicitly on current events, and shunga being stomped out. Reddit may be disappointed to hear there is not a history of satirical patriotic war-rape cartoons over a long period, but I'm very thankful. I'll try to situate this print within the larger artistic and social history of Japan.

Here's the little that we know about this print. It belongs to the British Museum and it's associated with the Russo-Japanese War, so has a date of circa 1904-1905. The artist and printer are anonymous. This is not surprising since at the time of its creation, this print was illegal. The print was exhibited in the 2013 exhibition, Shunga: Sex and pleasure in Japanese art, 1600-1900. The British Museum has a full description of the print by exhibit curator Timothy Clark which I'll quote in full here: the only published English information available on this particular print.

Popular print culture in Japan was extensively mobilised to support the country’s war effort in the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-5. This is a particularly savage piece of anti-Russian propaganda.A different (presumed earlier) version of the design was produced using different woodblocks. The flag at top left is Russian, the soldiers in the background are Russians fleeing, and the following dialogue appears with the two foreground figures:
[Russian:] (in Romanised script with katakana glosses) “I think I’m going to die!” (Watakushi mō shinisō desu)
[Japanese soldier:] “I’ll soon deliver the final blow…” (Sugu todome o sashite yarō)
[Russians:] “Quick, let’s run away!” (Hayaku nigero)
(T. Clark, 4/2013)This scene can be most aptly described as ‘Buggering the Russian’. Both the Japanese and Russian figures are infantry soldiers, since the Russian has what looks like a rifle with a bayonet. The Russian soldier is portrayed as distinctively Caucasian, with a pointed nose, white skin, and ginger hair and moustache (most likely styled after the traditional stereotyping of the Westerners as ‘red-haired’, or ko-mo- jin, in Japanese prints). The print ostensibly depicts sexual violence in a battlefield situation. However, the image is altogether more nuanced and complex because of the Russian soldier’s expression, which is somewhat muted. Also intriguing is the fact that this male-to-male sexual act takes place in an abstract space, with no obvious background illustration apart from the distant group of charging Japanese soldiers with a flag. Metaphorically, this image of a sexually potent Japanese soldier can be interpreted as the masculine and powerful conqueror, Japan. The Russian soldier is depicted as having no choice other than to accept the violent act of the Japanese conqueror – that is, Russia is no longer the dominant force in the region but subservient to the new power, Japan. Imagery relating to fighting appears in earlier shunga (see Clark et al 2013, p. 323 and cat. 108).

As I mentioned, I've found two cartoons of the same ilk, also both anonymous. Here's a print of a Japanese soldier having sex with a Russian woman while a Russian officer looks on in shock and horror. I can't make out/translate the captions to tell if it's precisely portrayed as a rape or a consensual encounter with the woman, but either way it's still an allegory of Japan violently proving its superiority over Russia, as demonstrated on the Russian "property" of this woman's body.

The third image possibly using rape as political satire is this disturbing picture of a Russian Cossack forcing himself on a Chinese woman, who is fighting him off It was part of a series of propaganda shunga. Given the propaganda context, Christie's suggested interpretation in auctioning off this piece seems reasonable:

This set-piece of erotica works well as propaganda: the virile attacker (Russia) is forcibly rejected by the weak woman (China), and his bayonet lies uselessly on the floor.

There were probably more prints of this sort than survive. Shunga was aggressively targeted within Japan in the early 20th century, while enthusiast Western collectors were mostly interested in older "works of art", not contemporary propaganda. As well, there are possibly other prints like this in archives and collections not published and/or scanned online.

Even though the print in question is fairly unique, it does fit within some larger traditions. Historically, shunga was fairly well tolerated - and even celebrated - in Japan, but there were periods of censorship by the shogunate. Specifically, there was a crackdown on shunga at the end of the 18th century, after which longtime regulations against portraying current events or figures were strictly enforced. There is a lot of scholarship arguing that Edo Period shunga, with its quasi-legal popular status, embodied important social satire and sly counter-culture commentary. However, it certainly didn't cover current events outright. For a shunga cartoon like the one we're considering to exist, there first needed to be explicit political cartoons, something that mostly didn't happen till the Meiji period.

However, during the Meiji period, the movement against shunga really got going. Adopting Western attitudes towards pornography, the Meiji government introduced its first legislation against shunga in 1872. Early legislation and enforcement were sporadic, but this trend was here to stay. I won't go into the details of Meiji obscenity laws through the next few decades, but by the time of the Russo-Japanese war, our starting print there was illegal. However, shunga was still widely available, more tolerated than not, and had its last big flowering during the war.