Rude bits in history

Public nudity has been in the news in the States lately, leading to Slate running a short article "Why is Public Nudity Illegal?"  The main answer given is as follows:

Because it’s so difficult to ignore. The late political philosopher Joel Feinberg’s “offense principle” offers one persuasive theory for why nudity is illegal. Feinberg argued that an act need not be objectively harmful to merit prohibition—it need only produce an unpleasant mental state such as shame, disgust, or anxiety in observers. Plenty of obnoxious but legal behaviors, like chewing with an open mouth or failure to bathe, can create the same reaction, but Feinberg claimed that nudity has a unique ability to demand our attention. He wrote, “The unresolved conflict between instinctual desires and cultural taboos leaves many people in a state of unstable equilibrium and a readiness to be wholly fascinated, in an ambivalent sort of way, by any suggestion of sexuality in their perceptual fields.” We are drawn ineluctably toward the sexual suggestiveness of the naked body, Feinberg argued, then ashamed of our own reaction. 

All fair enough from a Western point of view, I suppose, but I don't know that it takes into account countries with a rather more relaxed attitude to social nudity.   Which led me to Google up stuff about changing attitudes to nudity in Japan.  This site spends a fair bit of time on the topic, making several interesting observations along the way.  For example:

Members of the samurai class, men and women, did not (or at least were never supposed to) appear in public without being fully clothed. Many norms and values of the samurai class resembled those of Chinese elites, for whom incomplete dress indicated incomplete civilization. In Japan’s terribly hot and humid summers, men and women performing manual labor outdoors *often worked semi-naked*. Scant clothing, therefore, was mainly an indication of manual labor, and one way that samurai distinguished themselves from laborers was by their more formal and complete attire. In the summer, male laborers in rural and urban areas commonly wore only a loincloth both during work hours and while relaxing. Women often went topless and in any case did not wear underwear (more on this below).

It is common in today’s world to link nudity with sex. Clothing serves as a personal boundary marker, and its removal or lack in the sight of others is often an invitation to intimacy. The lack of clothing was especially an invitation to intimacy in Western society of the nineteenth century because the skin itself, along with the secondary sexual characteristics of the body (e.g., curve of hips, breasts, etc.—but not the genitalia) had long been eroticized in visual representations. But clothing or its lack need not function this way in all times, places, or circumstances. While sexuality does have a biological basis, the ways in which it manifests itself are largely products of complex social codes. In Tokugawa and early Meiji Japan, *clothing—not nakedness*—played a greater role in eroticism than it did in most of the Western world. As Timon Screech explains:

Other than the rich (who would not be much encountered in the ordinary townsperson's life), then, fine clothes meant the garb of theatricality or of paying sex. The Edo male would have touched finer fabrics in the arms of these two categories of provider than on any other occasion. The *sexual power* of texture and look in first-rate cloth was commensurately great; it may very well have excelled in excitement the feel of skin, since good cloth was harder to come by than good skin and was more expensive when one did.²

Fine clothing, worn in certain ways and accompanied by certain gestures, typically conveyed sexual messages. Nudity per se, however, usually did not convey sexual messages in Japan at this time, especially cases of habitual nudity such as a woman doing laundry outside topless. A scholar of the relationship be­tween clothing and eroticism explains: “In general, when any­thing is constantly exposed to view, it leaves nothing to the ima­gination, tends to be perceived as ordinary, and, eventually, is hardly noticed at all. The eye be­comes jaded; habitual nudity is notably unerotic.”³

The page points out that it was part of the Meiji period that the government sought to regulate away public nudity (or semi nudity) as part of their modernisation process.  I was amused to read about this early form of protest:

Police enforcement of the law brought forth a brief period of public protest—in the form of #streaking#—but the reaction of the state was to crack down even harder. People began to cover up. In 1890, the Tokyo police issued an order prohibiting mixed ba­thing (police had broad powers to issue orders for the “public good”). Most bath owners could not afford elaborate renovations, so they typi­cally ran a rope across the center of the tub to separate it into sections for men and women. In this way, they complied with the letter of the law but not its spirit.

There's lots more on the page that is interesting, including the rise of underwear (so to speak) in modern Japan.

The site also has another chapter about evolving views on sex in Japan, which contains a lot of interesting information too.  On the older issue of homosexuality, the picture painted is one similar, I suppose, to that of ancient Greece and (to a lesser extent) Rome:

In today's terminology, therefore, the typical Tokugawa Japanese was more or less bisexual, although Tokugawa Japanese generally recognized that people tended to have a preference for one flavor of sexuality or the other. But either way, joshoku and nanshoku were not radically different things. They were simply two broad varieties of sexuality and sexual activity. Was there any major condemnation of those who preferred nanshoku? The answer depends on what is meant by "major." Mark Ravina makes the following observation in the context of discussing an institution called gojū, neighborhood schools consisting of boys and teenagers in nineteenth-century Satsuma (a domain):

Was gojū culture gay? The question is both intriguing and anachronistic. "Homosexual," as a label for people, did not exist in Saigō [Takamori]'s day: sex with men was a practice rather than an identity. Like drinking or fishing, one could enjoy homosexuality regularly, occasionally, or never, according to personal preference. Lacking a biblical story of Sodom, Tokugawa-era Japanese had no concept of sodomy, and Tokugawa-era laws did not criminalize homosexual conduct itself. Legal injunctions against male-male sexuality focused largely on the result of "outrageous" or "provocative" sexual conduct. Like consorting with a geisha or drinking, male-male intercourse became a vice rather than a diversion only when taken to extremes. When Yonezawa domain issued regulations on homosexual activity in 1775, for example, it mentioned violence rather than perversion. Any conflict among a handsome young samurai, his father, and his lover could easily lead to drawn swords and mayhem. Homosexuality was a problem only because male lovers' quarrels tended to grow violent and threaten the public order. (Mark Ravina, The Last Samurai: The Life and Battles of Saigō Takamori [Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2004], p. 33.)

In addition to violence, another possible "extreme" of homosexual behavior would have been failure to reproduce. Elite and commoner society expected men and women to marry and produce some offspring, and exclusive indulgence in homosexuality would have a hindered fulfilling this expectation. The *third Tokugawa shōgun Iemitsu* is a good example of nanshoku, its potential for violence, its possible conflict with expectations to reproduce, and connections between sexuality and politics. Looking at the wide range of social commentary in Tokugawa Japan, we can find a few Confucian scholars and other moralists who denounced nanshoku as morally improper, though often in the context of a broader critique of a society allegedly obsessed with sex. Overall, however, these moralists did not enjoy a large or influential audience. Generally speaking we can say say that there was little or no social censure of non-violent nanshoku in Tokugawa times for those who met their basic social obligations.

I find it somewhat amusing that the main concern about intense homosexual relationships was the threat of samurai running around the streets battling over their lovers!  How different can you get from the modern Western idea of the "problem" (for want of a better word) with homosexuality?   There are many things a visitor fear accidentally seeing in San Francisco (well, the new anti nudity law might help with that), but bloody battles between armed men over their lovers is not one of them.