Introduction

Within eighteen months of Japan's 1945 surrender to the Allies, Japanese devotees of Western art queued in lines rivaling those for food rations to see a "Living Picture Show" staged on the fifth floor of a Shinjuku Theater, Having finally reached the head of the line, they confronted a series of wall-sized picture frames draped with black curtains. These were drawn back for ten-second intervals to reveal semi-nude women posed in twenty recreations of Western art masterpieces. In this "picture frame show," spectators could ogle, for example, scantily clad women in a Birth of Venus, as well as other models posed in famous pastoral, picnic, and beachfront scenes. While not shocking by present-day standards, such eroticism characterized postwar Japanese culture, an eroticism of commercialized sexuality that garnered hand-wringing and media attention to these "scandals" (all the while filling theaters and selling publications). One of those scandals centered on the famous scene from the 1947 stage adaptation of a Tamura Taijirō novel – a woman being strung up, stripped to the waist, and flogged – and filled Shinjuku's Kūkiza theater to capacity. ¹