BigDaiv: I don’t have a cite, but I believe that and other laws were enacted during the American occupation of Japan.
I’m not sure, but I think Bosda posted a link to an vintage piece of tentacle porn which looked like that. (It was Bosda who posted it, I’m just not sure if it was vintage or contemporary.)
Probably ‘Dream Of The Fisherman’s Wife’ IIRC the classic depiction of a woman having sex with an octopus is based on a folktale. Some examples are centuries old. Besides paintings and prints, it’s been represented in nestuke form. I was fascinated to learn that while many examples look like tentacle rape, certain specific postures and hairstyles indicate the woman is consenting
Weren’t those laws introduced to the Japanese by the United States as part of the surrender/reconstruction effort after WWII? Something about protecting the poor Japanese from social degeneration, IIRC.
Why is the lady in the picture holding what appears to be one of those female condom things? I kept trying to figure out what else it could be, and I keep coming up empty. Is it in the legend somebody mentioned?
Zsofia, Teraoka did a series of prints about AIDS when the disease first emerged in the Eighties (I think they were commissioned by the city of San Diego.) As you might expect, Condoms figured heavily in the series. The paintings showed things like a Geisha in a bath ripping open a pack of condoms as a ghost is crawling through the window, or a couple who is trying to put a giant condom onto an equally giant snake. The idea was that these people already had the disease and were acting too late. I’m sure that the condom is a holdover from the series and is his way of saying “always practice safe sex.”