Miyagawa Chōshun (宮川長春, c. 1682–1752) is not a household name outside specialist circles — but he probably should be. He worked in Edo during a period when same-sex desire was openly depicted in art, gender was understood as a spectrum rather than a binary, and erotic painting involving men with men could end up in a deluxe collector’s handscroll. That this history remains obscure says more about the past two centuries of cultural erasure than about the period itself.
Who Was Chōshun?
Chōshun was born in Miyagawa, in Owari Province (present-day Aichi Prefecture), probably around 1682. By around 1700, he had made his way to Edo — the city that would become Tokyo — where he trained under artists of the Tosa and Kanō schools, and fell under the influence of Hishikawa Moronobu, the founder of the ukiyo-e tradition. His debt to Moronobu ran deep: on at least one major work, the Handscroll of Ten Homoerotic (Nanshoku) Scenes now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he signed himself “Hishikawa Chōshun,” indicating he saw himself as Moronobu’s stylistic heir — despite being too young to have studied under him directly.
He founded what became the Miyagawa school of painting, and he and his pupils are among the very few ukiyo-e artists to have never created woodblock prints. Everything he made was hand-painted on paper or silk. That alone sets him apart: in an era when the woodblock print was the dominant medium for reaching a mass audience, Chōshun chose the slower, more expensive, more intimate form. His clients were collectors, not commoners.
Scholar Richard Lane considered his coloring among the best in all of ukiyo-e art. Lane also, in his encyclopedic Images from the Floating World (1978), called Chōshun a “neglected genius.” His stock has risen steadily in the decades since, partly through the Museum of Fine Arts Boston’s landmark exhibition Drama and Desire, which featured four masterworks from their collection.
His career ended badly — not from obscurity but from a dispute over money. In 1751, Chōshun was commissioned by a Kanō painter to help restore the Nikkō Tōshō-gū shrine, the Tokugawa shogunate’s family mausoleum. When he wasn’t paid, the resulting confrontation turned violent: a Kanō family member was killed, and Chōshun was banished from Edo. He died not long after his exile ended.
The World He Painted: Edo’s “Floating World” and Its Queer Dimensions
Ukiyo-e translates, roughly, as “pictures of the floating world” — the transient, pleasure-seeking urban culture of Edo Japan. The Edo period school of ukiyo-e focused on genre scenes and stylized portraits of courtesans, samurai, and kabuki actors who inhabited the pleasure districts of Edo, Kyoto, and Osaka. These were the celebrities of their day.
But the floating world was also, by the standards of most pre-modern societies, remarkably queer. During the Edo period, the concept of pansexual gender fluidity and ambiguity was accepted and celebrated, though largely from a male perspective. Three overlapping phenomena made this possible.
Wakashū: Edo’s third gender. Male youths known as wakashū occupied an androgynous role in society and were often courted by both male and female lovers. They wore their hair in a distinctive style — forelocks and a shaven pate beneath an extra-long topknot — and often dressed in kimonos more typical of women. They worked as pages, as entertainers, as kabuki performers. Edo Japan recognized them as an “in-between” position, and that recognition was embedded in law, custom, and art.
Onnagata: men performing femininity on stage. After female actors were banned from kabuki theatre in 1629, male performers took female roles. These actors were sexually idolised, and the practice of male actors in female roles — known as onnagata — was highly popular and frequently depicted by artists. The most celebrated onnagata were cultural icons.
Nanshoku: male same-sex desire as documented practice. The word nanshoku (男色) refers to male homosexual relations, and it was not a taboo subject. During the Edo period, there was no stigma associated with male-male sexual liaisons, and many famous writers, artists, and other public figures were known to have same-sex lovers. Shunga — erotic painting and printmaking — depicted it openly.
This is the world Chōshun worked in. His figures inhabit it completely.
Chōshun’s Queer Works
Most of Chōshun’s output depicts courtesans. His figures have a soft, warm femininity, and they are fuller and more voluptuous than those of many contemporaries. But what makes his body of work significant from a queer perspective is what sits alongside those paintings.
The Nanshoku Handscroll. The most important piece is the Handscroll of Ten Homoerotic (Nanshoku) Scenes, now held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession no. 2022.322). It is, by any measure, an unusual work. While scenes of male-male sex occasionally appeared within broader erotic handscrolls, to have an entire work dedicated to homoerotic liaisons is rare. Ten scenes, each depicting lovemaking between an older man and one or more younger men dressed in flamboyant costumes.
The participants include scions of samurai families, young kabuki actors in brightly colored kimonos more appropriate for women, and wakashū escorts. One scene includes a female voyeur watching from behind a screen. The emotional range varies scene by scene — some tender, some more explicit. The final five are considerably more graphic than the first five. Chōshun signed it under the name Hishikawa Chōshun, with two seals.
It is worth pausing on what this work is. This is not marginalia. It is not a private joke or a crude aside. It is a deluxe painted handscroll, produced for a collector, combining technical mastery with deliberate compositional storytelling. The late Moronobu style is integrated into the softer, more voluptuous mood of the early eighteenth century. The brilliantly detailed kimono — Chōshun’s signature strength — appears throughout.
The Wakashū Hanging Scroll. One of the few known paintings by Chōshun depicting a male figure is a hanging scroll of a wakashū, held by the Tokyo National Museum. The young man wears the characteristic hairstyle — forelocks and a shaved pate beneath an extra-long topknot — along with an elegant haori jacket, trousers, and swords at his sash. The same figure type appears in several scenes in the homoerotic handscroll, connecting the two works directly.
A Young Dandy. In the collection of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, this painting shows a stylish young man pausing under a blossoming plum tree. He wears a striped kimono over a red undergarment and carries a flute, affecting the look of a komuso (a mendicant flute player). The accessories — peaked straw hat, wooden clogs, a priest’s kesa apron — are all costume, performance, a young man trying on an identity. Whether or not we read queerness into the figure explicitly, the painting participates in the same ukiyo-e fascination with gender as performance, with the carefully constructed self.
Shunga. Chōshun and his students produced a great number of shunga works. A shunga scroll attributed to Chōshun, only one scene of which was published (by Richard Lane in the 1970s), depicts wakashū figures — including one effeminately dressed young man who makes the first move in a game of go. These works show a consistent engagement with gender ambiguity as both subject and aesthetic.
What Happened After: The Erasure of Edo’s Queerness
The tradition of the wakashū, and the relatively open attitudes toward same-sex desire that accompanied it, died out around 1860. Japan’s encounter with Western powers brought not only military and commercial pressure but a set of rigid Victorian-era gender norms that had no room for Edo’s third gender. The same nationalist project that reshaped Japan’s political institutions also policed its sexuality. Without their distinctive hairstyles, clothes, and social role, wakashū effectively ceased to exist as a gender category.
Today, same-sex marriage remains illegal in Japan at the national level, though some municipalities recognize partnerships. The open attitudes documented in Chōshun’s paintings — in the Met’s nanshoku handscroll, in the Tokyo National Museum’s wakashū scroll — are not a product of some imagined golden age, but they are a corrective to the assumption that queerness is a modern Western invention imposed on other cultures. These paintings are, among other things, evidence.
Best-Known Works
| Title | Date | Current Location |
|---|---|---|
| Handscroll of Ten Homoerotic (Nanshoku) Scenes | Early 18th century | Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
| Wakashū (Male Youth) | Early 18th century | Tokyo National Museum |
| A Young Dandy | Early 18th century | Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth |
| Female Dancer | c. 1704–1736 | Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
| Handscroll (genre scene) | c. 1707–1708 | British Museum, London |
| Hanging scroll, mitate-e | Edo period | British Museum, London |
| Beauty in the Snow | Edo period | Ishikawa Nanao Art Museum, Japan |
| Courtesan and her Lover | Edo period | Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney |
| Various bijinga (paintings of beautiful women) | c. 1704–1751 | Minneapolis Institute of Art |
Further Reading
- Wikipedia: Miyagawa Chōshun
- Metropolitan Museum of Art: Handscroll of Ten Homoerotic (Nanshoku) Scenes
- JSTOR Daily: The Disappearance of Japan’s “Third Gender”
- NGV: Interpreting Shunga — Sex and Desire Between Women in Edo’s Floating World
- Curationist: Gender Variations in Edo Japan
- Kimbell Art Museum: A Young Dandy
- Richard Lane, Images from the Floating World (1978)
