I’ve written about some of America’s crazy cultural issues in the last couple of posts, but it’s not alone in having some strange attitudes. All countries have odd cultural baggage when it comes to sexuality and gender. The latest example from Japan would be this story of an artist and her vagina canoe.
As any porn aficionado will tell you, Japan has odd laws around pornography and obscenity. Japanese producers create some fairly extreme (to Western eyes) material, but the genitals must be obscured. Artist Megumi Igarashi pushed this law to the point of absurdity by distributing the data that would allow someone to ‘print’ a 3D model of her vagina. She did so to help fund a canoe also modeled on her body. Amazingly, for distributing what’s basically a mathematical description of part of her own body, she was found guilty of obscenity and fined 400,000 Yen (about $3,680). The problem with pointing out the absurdity of a law is that after you’re done with the absurdity the law bit is still there. One can only hope that the sheer ridiculousness of the ruling may provoke a change.
Past artists have worked around the censorship laws with strategically placed objects. Mike Myers had fun with that approach in this Austin Powers clip. Namio Harukawa was a little subtler in the image below.
