Audiences devoured stories about weirdos indulging in erotic cannibalism, sprinkling body parts like breadcrumbs all over Tokyo, and pulling a Moreau-Mengele to "rid Japan of healthy people and fill it with freaks." Historians disagree on why. One avant-garde artist group distributed a magazine with firecrackers attached to the cover, declaring “One should demand revolution as one demands alcohol and fulfillment of sexual desire.”Įro guro had found its perfect breeding ground. The culturati had a hell of a time playing with decadence and radicalism literature, art, film, mass media, and higher education flourished. Here, the Taisho period ran on social unrest, reckless consumerism, and increased Westernization. It was now sandwiched between the nationalist, patriarchal, and aggressively industrialized late Meiji period and the conservative, repressive, and militarist Showa period. The country had survived both the Russo-Japanese War and WWI. Japan in the ‘20s was always high, the kind induced only by modernity gone off the rails. IT WAS A FORM OF RESISTANCE AND SOCIETAL CRITIQUE One of its most famous short stories, written by ero guro godfather Edogawa Ranpo, involves a deaf, mute, and dumb quadriplegic war veteran whose wife is duty-bound to act as his nursemaid and sex slave until she snaps and tortures him. The movement’s defining moment was 1936’s Abe Sada Incident, when a failed geisha-turned-prostitute strangled her lover to death during sex, cut off his genitals, and carried them around in her kimono. Common refrains are bondage, mutilation, and monstrosity - often at the same time. It’s not horror or pornography, although it can contain those elements it often provides searing social commentary and it’s much easier to exemplify than explain. It was the poltergeist of ‘20s and ‘30s Japan’s snarling, restless hedonism, a manifestation of its fascination with the erotic, the perverse, the corrupt, and the bizarre. Ero guro nansensu, or ero guro for short, is not only a literary and artistic movement, but an attitude and a philosophy.