This is a guest post by John Resig, creator of the site Ukiyo-e.org and Visiting Researcher at Ritsumeikan University.
Let's dig in to the world of Japanese woodblock printing (commonly referred to as Ukiyo-e, "Pictures of the floating world"). There is enough weird art history here to keep this blog running indefinitely.
A good place to start is with the master of all that is strange: Utagawa Kuniyoshi. A prolific artist who worked in the early-to-mid 1800s primarily focusing on prints of actors and warriors (and to a lesser degree courtesans and landscapes). All common fair for artists of the Utagawa school of print designers.
The first print by Kuniyoshi seems innocuous enough. We have a bunch of cute turtles scurrying around. Artistically the piece is formed as a triptych and features a lot of bokashi (gradation) so this piece likely wouldn't have been cheap (roughly equivalent to a few meals).
However, things are not all that they seem, let's look closer at the faces of the turtles.
And this is where things start to slip into WTF territory. These turtles all have, not just, faces but human faces.
In actuality these faces are the faces of famous Kabuki actors, a mainstay of the "floating world" culture in Edo (Tokyo) during the 17th to 19th century. Prints depicting Kabuki actors were, typically, very popular throughout this period. People loved being able to see their favorite actors in their current, or upcoming, roles.
So why are these actors being depicted as turtles? In a word? Censorship. This print was published in 1842 during the height of the Tempo reforms in Japan. There was a major crackdown on what was allowed to be depicted in prints (depictions of actors and courtesans were banned amongst other far-reaching restrictions).
To get around this restriction Kuniyoshi hid the faces of the famous actors of the face on the turtles and placed the actor's crest (mon) on the back of the turtle's shell. An avid kabuki viewer would've been able to piece the together the face and crest and figure out who was being depicted. A fun puzzle for the fan!
For comparison these are some prints by Utagawa Kunisada from just 10 years later, in 1852, depicting the same actors as above: Ichikawa Kuzô II and Nakamura Utaemon IV.
These are much closer to a typical representation of a kabuki actor in a print (being able to clearly see the actors face, clothes, and location of the play).
Naturally during this era of censorship Kuniyoshi didn't just limit himself to turtles he used all sorts of animals and objects. In this case: cats! (Sidebar: He LOVED cats. He made enough fun/weird cat prints to fill many volumes.)
Do you recognize the cat on the bottom right? That's our friend Nakamura Utaemon IV again!
What's interesting is that after the censorship of the Tempo reform cooled off and "normal" actor prints were published for a while (as seen above in the Kunisada prints) there was a resurgence of interest in these actor's-faces-on-animal-bodies prints. Like this above print by Utagawa Yoshiiku, a pupil of Kuniyoshi, created in 1863. Censorship wasn't an issue in this depiction but people obviously still enjoyed the trope as there are a number of similar prints from this period.
Censorship and sumptuary laws imposed upon print makers continually forced them to think of inventive ways to skirt around the law. Many were successful, some were not, but at the very least it gave us some very compelling prints that really gets us to consider WTF was going on!
