Nakedness

Brain (1979) writes about the connection between Japanese tattoo and nudity. The Japanese use tattooing to give personality to the naked body. A nude to them has never been considered "divine" or even beautiful as it has in the West. The sight of the naked body really does not have the slightest charm. So erotic drawings never depict naked people and erotic women are never nude. A man or woman tattooed by the irezumi artist is never defenselessly nude without clothes. In fact tattooing "clothes" a Japanese (p.64).

Hiler (1929) also states that tattooing in Japan was substituted for clothing: "In Japan nothing immodest is found in the fact that the sexes bathe together in a state of absolute nudity, but any representation of the nude in art is considered indecent (p.5).

My question is whether the purpose of theJapanese tattoo is to hide the naked body because nudity is embarrassing. Nomura's article, "Remodelling the Japanese Body" (1990) provides answers to this question. He gives an example of the American zoologist, Edward Morse's work, Japan Day by Day (1917). Semi-nakedness was a natural part of the landscape in Japan at that time.

Morse's intellectual interest was aroused by all kinds of things and manners Japanese. In particular, he seems to have been strongly impressed by the fact that the Japanese often lived in a semi-naked state. He repeatedly notes the steaming bodies of rickshaw men resting after a ride; a woman in only a loincloth lying down with a baby to make it go to sleep; fishermen with just their fundoshi (loincloths) on mending their nets.Naked bodies appeared to Morse's eyes everywhere in the Japanese landscape (pp.259-260).

Nakedness used to be an accepted part of daily life. The Japanese were accustomed to seeing nudity. It did not always imply eroticism. As Hiler (1929) mentions, the Japanese have the habit of bathing. In those days, people did not have a bathtub at home. They usually took a public bath. Tattoo wearers took more time for a bath to show their tattoos proudly. Besides, there were many jobs in which the workers exposed most of their bodies: rickshaw men, fisher people, firemen, ama (women divers) or carpenters were all semi-naked or naked. Both males and females did not care about being naked in public.

Imagine sumo wrestlers. They still wrestle in the traditional way. Their nakedness was a part of their job. Nomura (1990) also mentions that there was a travelogue which naked peasants showed up in the early modern times. The scene of nakedness was very natural to the Japanese. Probably, tattooed people were often seen as well.

.In terms of aesthetic views, however, Japan has different ways of expressing eroticism from the West. Michener (1954) explains that ukiyo-e avoids nakedness and foregoes slick suggestiveness (p.202). It does not mean that ukiyo-e ignores eroticism, but rather, it is free of erotic content (Michener, 1954).

It is often said that in Japan naked parts denote coquetry only when set in the context of the tension resulting from the relationship between the naked and covered parts. For example, the simple exposure of private parts is not immediately connected with coquetry (Nomura, 1990: 262).