With the first women’s university opening in 1918, the moga could be anything, from a journalist to a dancer to a typist. She was completely sexually liberated and financially independent.
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She languished in European-style cafes and movie theaters. She smoked, she shopped, she fucked as she pleased. Like the flapper, she did not consider herself political but was inherently politicized she was respectable Japan’s scapegoat for the Western corruption of traditional values. The moga, with her short bob and long legs, was the Japanese flapper.
In its heyday, ero guro accompanied the explosion of a new youth culture made up of mobo (modern boys) and moga (modern girls) who embraced countercultural Western values and fashions. “The Japanese revere this guy called the Emperor, but why do they? Such an emperor should be beaten to death, roasted, and eaten dipped in soy sauce,” read a piece of 1940 graffiti documented by historian Miriam Silverberg.
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Was it an exploration of their brand-new sexual, moral, and intellectual freedom? A massive fuck you to state-sanctioned values? A satire of Westernization run amok? All three? As one era bled into the next and the state cracked down on what it perceived to be a festering immorality caused by radical leftists, ero guro became an even darker and more nihilistic form of countercultural resistance. Audiences devoured stories about weirdos indulging in erotic cannibalism, sprinkling body parts like breadcrumbs all over Tokyo, and pulling a Moreau-Mengele to "rid Japan of healthy people and fill it with freaks." Historians disagree on why. One avant-garde artist group distributed a magazine with firecrackers attached to the cover, declaring “One should demand revolution as one demands alcohol and fulfillment of sexual desire.”Įro guro had found its perfect breeding ground. The culturati had a hell of a time playing with decadence and radicalism literature, art, film, mass media, and higher education flourished. Here, the Taisho period ran on social unrest, reckless consumerism, and increased Westernization. It was now sandwiched between the nationalist, patriarchal, and aggressively industrialized late Meiji period and the conservative, repressive, and militarist Showa period. The country had survived both the Russo-Japanese War and WWI. Japan in the ‘20s was always high, the kind induced only by modernity gone off the rails. IT WAS A FORM OF RESISTANCE AND SOCIETAL CRITIQUE One of its most famous short stories, written by ero guro godfather Edogawa Ranpo, involves a deaf, mute, and dumb quadriplegic war veteran whose wife is duty-bound to act as his nursemaid and sex slave until she snaps and tortures him. The movement’s defining moment was 1936’s Abe Sada Incident, when a failed geisha-turned-prostitute strangled her lover to death during sex, cut off his genitals, and carried them around in her kimono. Common refrains are bondage, mutilation, and monstrosity - often at the same time.
It’s not horror or pornography, although it can contain those elements it often provides searing social commentary and it’s much easier to exemplify than explain.
It was the poltergeist of ‘20s and ‘30s Japan’s snarling, restless hedonism, a manifestation of its fascination with the erotic, the perverse, the corrupt, and the bizarre. Ero guro nansensu, or ero guro for short, is not only a literary and artistic movement, but an attitude and a philosophy.