Trying to search for images based on text and tags sucks. Besides conjuring the excitement of an entertainment district where the usual roles don’t apply, pictures of the Floating World also came to represent - as those cherry blossoms suggest - life’s transience.Let’s face it. The district developed and changed as Japanese society changed, and over time it came to play a major role in the imaginations of the rising middle class. In fact, the Yoshiwara district was established by the Tokugawa shogunate in the early 17th century precisely to limit, isolate and control the bawdier activities of the newly thriving merchant classes. Japan and the West had different sexual mores, but Japan’s culture was not particularly licentious or permissive. But pleasure districts, wrote Screech, “were then brought back into the domestic world of duty via the medium of pictures.” And those pictures were largely fantasies.Įven when they weren’t sexually explicit, ukiyo-e (“pictures of the Floating World”) were intended to titillate. True, this imagined place had real-world equivalents, by far the most famous of which was Edo’s New Yoshiwara (the old Yoshiwara burned down in 1657). In his book on erotic images in Japan between 17, the scholar Timon Screech described the Floating World, or ukiyo, as a “state of mind.” The Floating World was the “cognitive condition of being apart from the ‘fixed’ world of daily life and duty,” he explained.
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