🚨🖼️ Pervy Art Inspector: Innocent Art With a Secret

🚨 Warning, some images are explicit

Everyday you’re bombarded with videos, photos, podcasts — all kinds of media hungry for your attention. People of the past didn’t have this luxury. They had to crawl through the trenches of boredom with nothing but gossip and lines of ink printed on paper with wood. Being in charge of one of the few entertainment mediums, woodblock printers had to get creative.

The innocent image above is a woodblock print by Utagawa Kunifusa called Playing Sugoroku at a Heated Table. Sugoroku was a board game. It looks like friends playing an innocent game together. Yeah, they’re playing together alright, but it’s hardly innocent.

Their heads tilt towards the table and their expressions are a bit weird, like something else is going on. The women even cover their faces a bit. What is it?

In kabuki theatre, actors would quickly change appearance or face masks, putting on a different role immediately. These were called hayagawari 早替り (“quick-change techniques”). Artists thought, “Why let theatres have all the fun?” and made up ways to change their art right before your eyes, letting you see the image in a totally different way.

This type of art was called hayagawari-e 早替り絵 (“quick-change pictures”), or komochi-e 子持絵. These pictures had flaps that you could pull to one side to reveal hidden art. The porn industry of the time would make prints of normal non-sexual scenes, but flip up the flap and it’s pure debauchery.

So here’s the original artwork with the flap pulled to one side to reveal what’s underneath the tablecloth.

Rather than concentrating on the game, they’re playing footsie. More than just footsie, even. What are his toes doing? OH MY GOD.