Let’s All Take a Moment to Appreciate These 200-Year-Old Japanese Fart Scrolls
Let’s break down a fart for a second. It comes out of your ass. It smells like poop because it’s been hanging out next to it for a long time. And it makes a little trumpet noise when it comes out. You don’t have to be smart to laugh at farts, but you have to be stupid not to. —Louis C.K.
Here’s your Wikipedia-cribbed (f)art history lesson of the day.
During Japan’s Edo period (1603–1868), unknown artists created elaborate scenes called, appropriately, he-gassen, or “fart battle,” in response to Japan’s xenophobic attitude toward Europeans. The Tokugawa shogunate ruthlessly persecuted Christians, and by the middle of the 17th century, few foreigners were allowed in restricted sections of Japan. Only the Chinese, the Dutch East India Company and a group of English traders could avoid arrest and execution without trial.
The xenophobia was pretty silly, these artists thought. It might as well be a fart battle. Hence these images of people farting on horseback, farting on cats, farting through tables, fanning farts back at the farters, testing out fart levitation, storing and unleashing farts from a big fart bag, farting down a building, farting down trees and just general happy fartery.
It’s actually quite sophisticated. He-gassen is awfully clever scatological satire, in the vein of Rabelais or Jonathan Swift, who filled his British government–trolling Gulliver’s Travels with lots and lots of detailed visuals of poop and pee and gas. Throughout history, artists and writers have used excrement to symbolize corruption. It works so well because even if you don’t quite get the significance, you can laugh and simply enjoy being human.
(via DailyMail via io9 via Tofugu via Naruhodo via Waseda University)
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