After 200 years, Japan's exiled erotica finds a home in Rotterdam museum

Independent
By David McNeill in Tokyo
29 January 2005


In an age of malfunctioning primetime bras and rampant internet porn, a collection of 200-year-old Japanese woodblock prints has proved it still has the power to get the censors' hearts beating faster.

The prints sound as harmless as Horlicks but Shunga, meaning "spring pictures" were the Japanese pornography of the 18th and 19th centuries.

Made from woodblocks, the images of couples grappling in various states of romantic repose are the forebears of the erotic Manga comics and are today traded among the world's art collectors.

Now Shunga forms the centerpiece of what is being billed the "first chronological overview of Japanese erotic art", not in Japan, where it is illegal to import them, but in the Netherlands.

http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/story.jsp?story=605729
SORRY no pics....