Ero guro

The personification of guro XD

Vorlage:Nihongo is a wasei-eigo term that describes a literary and artistic movement from 1920s and '30s Japan. Ero guro puts its focus on eroticism, sexual corruption and decadence. This movement is often used incorrectly by western audiences to mean "gore"—depictions of horror, blood, and guts. In actuality the "grotesque" term implies malformed, unnatural or horrific. While ero guro is a specific movement, many of its components can be found throughout Japanese history and culture. Items that are pornographic and bloody are not necessarily ero guro.

History

Ero guro nansensu, characterized as a "prewar, bourgeois cultural phenomenon that devoted itself to explorations of the deviant, the bizarre, and the ridiculous," manifested in the popular culture of Taishō Tokyo during the 1920s. Writer Ian Buruma describes the social atmosphere of the time as "a skittish, sometimes nihilistic hedonism that brings Weimar Berlin to mind." Its roots go back to erotic shunga artists like Yoshitoshi, whose mid-1860s woodblock printings showed decapitations and acts of violence from Japanese history. Ukiyo-e artists such as Utagawa Kuniyoshi presented similar themes with bondage, rape, and erotic crucifixion.

Ero guro's first distinct appearance began in 1920s and 1930s Japanese literature. The Sada Abe Incident of 1936, where a woman choked and castrated her lover, struck a chord with the ero guro movement, and came to represent that genre for years to come. This and other activities and movements were generally suppressed in Japan during World War II, but re-emerged in the postwar period, especially in manga and music.

Over time, the ero guro movement's influence expanded into parts of Japanese theatre, art, manga, and eventually film and music.

Later influences

Ero guro is also an element of many Japanese horror films and pinku eiga, particularly of the 1960s and 1970s. Examples include Teruo Ishii's Shogun's Joys of Torture (1968) and Horrors of Malformed Men (1969) and Yasuzo Masumura's Blind Beast (盲獣, 1969), the latter two based on the works of Edogawa Rampo. A more recent example of ero guro in cinema is Sion Sono's Strange Circus (奇妙なサーカス, 2005).

There are modern guro artists, some of who cite Erotic Grotesque Nonsense as an influence on their work. These artists explore the macabre intermingled with sexual overtones. Often the erotic element, even when not explicit, is merged with grotesque themes and features similar to the works of H. R. Giger. Others produce ero guro as a genre of Japanese pornography and hentai involving blood, gore, disfiguration, violence, mutilation, urine, enemas, or feces.

Examples of well-known guro mangaka include Suehiro Maruo, Shintaro Kago, Jun Hayami, Toshio Maeda, Henmaru Machino, Horihone Saizō, and Waita Uziga.

The modern genre of tentacle rape began within the category of ero guro (although it has much older roots in Japanese art; see The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife), but was so popular that it is now usually considered separately.

In music

Visual kei bands frequently have a concept or theme relating to ero guro, some calling it a subgenre of visual kei. The band Cali Gari was heavily influenced by Erotic Grotesque Nonsense and Angura. Western visual kei fans mistook this theme as a description of their "genre" and linked it with other visual kei bands. The Czech goregrind band Jig-Ai often uses guro as central theme for their album covers and lyrics.

See also

• Tokyo Red Hood
• Mnemosyne (anime)

References

• Aguilar, Carlos (editor). Bizarre Sinema! Japanese Ero Gro & Pinku Eiga 1956–1979. Firenze, Italy: Glittering Images, 2005. ISBN 88-8275-065-5.
• McLelland, Mark. "A Short History of 'Hentai'" (pdf version). Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context, issue 12 (January 2006). ISSN 1440 9151.
• Silverberg, Miriam Rom. Galley copy of the table of contents and preface for Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times. December 12, 2005.
• Silverberg, Miriam Rom. Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times. Asia Pacific modern, 1. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. ISBN 0520222733.

External links

• Suehiro Maruo's website
• Shintaro Kago's website
• Waita Uziga's website
• An English-language image board dedicated to guro