ABSTRACT
'Pornography' is understood as obscene text and images. This chapter focuses on images from the mid-20th century, a neglected period in the study of Japanese art history. While the shunga produced in the Edo period are a renowned form of Japanese pornography, and Japan is famous for adult videos, games, comics, and other kinds of pornography, the vast but somewhat obscure pornography produced in mid-20th-century Japan and East Asia is relatively unknown. The chapter examines the representations of erotica and pornography in the period of Japanese militarism and war between 1931 and 1945 and gives examples from Korea and China. In Japanese-occupied Korea, female portraits and pornography arrived with the colonizers. In the Republic of China, meanwhile, Shanghai enjoyed prosperity between the two world wars. While Tokyo was recovering from the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, Shanghai was the most exciting global metropolis in East Asia.
