Japanese erotic art, bondage and Maria Ozawa

The Times has a long article today about two new books on Japanese erotic art; Gian Carlo Calza's Poem of the Pillow and Other Stories and Rosina Buckland's Shunga: Erotic Art in Japan. This iis a pretty good article and both books are now on my Amazon wish list.

Over the years I have developed a keen interest in things Japanese and have read dozens and dozens of books about the country, as well as listening to loads of Japanese underground music. In the study where I am writing this now, I would say that the "books on Japan" section of my library is perhaps the 7th or 8th largest section. There have been dozens of really good TV shows about Japan, many of which I have been collecting recently from various download sites. One highlight that I recording on video years ago was a film by Stephen Pern about walking the length of Japan which I have watched more than a dozen times over the years. The books by Basho and Geishas by Lindsay Downer and the Japanese travel writing by people like Oliver Stadler and Alan Booth remain among my all-time favourites. So much of the content of the Times article was material that I was quite familiar with - nontheless, it has set me thinking again about issues like "cultural differences"

When I finally visited Japan in 1997 it was on a fast business trip. I have often regretted not adding a few day's holiday to the end of this trip. I was only there for a few days, but the impact has stayed with me over the years. Three events stand out in particular. First, I stumbled across an Irish pub on the 7th floor of a building in the Shujuku area of town. There I spent a very pleasant evening talking to a Japanese girl about her life, etc. At one point, she, and several other Japanese girls and salarymen got up on a stage and did the dance from Riverdance - one of the oddest sights I have ever seen.

Second, there was the amazing meal we went out for one night - 12 courses, including live baby octopus steamed in a bag and the highly dangerous puffer fish. We were served by a geisha girl (or someone dressed as one). Later, back in England, I was told that had I made some comments about how beautiful the "geisha" was, my hosts (a major Japanese bank) might well have "bought" her for me for the night - on and off, I have often wondered what that would have been like!

Typical Shungu - would this be what a night with a Geisha would be like?

This pose often features in Buddhist tantrism where it is called "yab yum" - also mentioned in Jack Kerouac's Dharma Bums of course

When I had a couple of walks round some of the neon areas of Tokyo, I was struck a couple of times by girls in the street advertising various clubs, but not to foreigners - gaijin - such as myself. One that I did go in for a hour or so was among the weirdest places I have been. Basically it was a club where the floorshow consisted of pretty girls being tied up in extremely ornate ways. This is called Shibari and it something of a Japanese art form. The girl were dressed in various outfits ranging from classical kimonos to office girls, nurses and schoolgirls, the latter being something of an obsession in Japan. Most of the ties involved complex suspensions. It was all pretty odd. Last year the BBC screened a documentary series about Japan where one of the episodes covered the bondage scene there, and some of the girls were interviewed.

Some Western "arty" shibari photographs

A couple of years ago I came across a short film about a Western women at a Japanese shibari house. She was tied in a variety of interesting positions. Maybe as it was a western woman and a Japanese man, I thought she was an incredibly erotic film. I did have it saved somewhere but am not sure where now!

Modern Japanese pornography has been a regular feature of magazines like Bizarre. I buy about 3 issues of this a year - just to remind myself how wierd the world really is. One issue had an article about a porn actress called Maria Ozawa. A few months ago there was a newspaper article saying she had been refused entry to a country where she was making a regular movie because of her racy other films. I suspect that if called upon to say, I would nominate Maria Ozawa as the most beautiful woman in the world! Apparently she is of mixed descent - Japanese and French-Canadian. Maybe that accounts for her extraordinary look?

The totally stunning Maria Ozawa