The original impetus for this interesting volume came during the 1994 Kyoto Conference on Japanese studies, which that year put emphasis on shunga, those traditional erotic prints that had been, until then, tidied up or hidden away.
By the 1990s exposure was much more general. Publication was allowed and by the end of the decade, the ukiyo-e section of any major Japanese bookstore was 80 percent filled with shunga.
This victory against censorship was entirely supported by the academic art history community. Their work had long been frustrated: how to write about such an important artist as Utamaro, for example, whose works contained a large proportion of what was later considered "obscene." Indeed, Japan's best-known feminist, Chizuko Ueno, said that unless one looked at shunga one could not understand traditional Japanese concepts of sexuality in general and gender in particular.