SHUNGA ALERT, Best of the Fest award winner at San Diego Fringe Festival 2024, is an adults-only comedy-documentary about sexual culture in Japan. It’s a commentary about the traditional erotic art form shunga, and also about the conservative culture that prevails in the country. The show itself includes graphic shunga images using Ukiyo-e (Japanese woodblock prints) and also puppetry and a warning, (ALERT).
Company founders Daniel Wishes (also writer) and Seri Yanai (art designer) spoke with SNACK about the concept and what it’s been like to work on this unusual production, as well as the rationale behind expressing it as a comedy documentary with puppets.
Where did the inspiration come from for SHUNGA ALERT?
Daniel: When Seri and I met each other in a puppetry school in the UK, we tried to do every kind of puppetry possible; now we specialise in shadow puppetry. Our first shadow puppetry show was called Oni, and it was based on erotic Japanese folk tales. That was our first show that people really connected with. We mostly did family shows, but we always had a place in our heart for Oni and we always dreamed of making a contemporary version that was bigger and better. So that’s what SHUNGA ALERT is.
An adult comedy documentary – it’s an interesting and perhaps niche format for the show. Why do it as a comedy documentary?
Daniel: [joking] There’s a lot of sexy comedy documentaries of erotic Japanese culture using puppetry at the Fringe, but we thought that we could do one that’s better than the other ones.
Seri: It’s quite extreme. It’s weird in a way but it’s also very conservative – our culture, and the way people act.
Daniel: Yes, the thing is that lots of people in the west really believe that Japan is this weird and wacky place, but it’s not – it’s very conservative. It’s an interesting thing to discuss and we thought we could make a piece that really makes people think about that.
What brought you to the title of SHUNGA ALERT?
Daniel: In Japan, there’s a very popular form of art called Ukiyo-e – have you ever seen the ‘Great Wave off Kanagawa’ in the UK on bags and t-shirts? Ukiyo-e is a form of wood block printing. It was originally artists doing portraits of the red-light district of Japan, so all the women in the pictures were sex workers and Japanese artists such as Hokusai – considered to be the greatest Japanese artist of all time – made Shunga, which is the more explicit form of Ukiyo-e, the very pornographic version.
As many people might know, pornography in Japan is completely censored or pixelated – it’s illegal to show any kind of [explicit] sexual imagery at all in Japan. One artist created a 3D-printed canoe that was designed to look like her vulva and she went to jail for that – but because Shunga is considered part of Japan’s rich cultural history and is the only kind of pornography that is not illegal in Japan, we thought that was really interesting.
We also show Shunga on stage and it’s explicit, so we like to warn people before we show these sexual images by yelling SHUNGA ALERT! Then if people don’t want to see it, they can cover their eyes.
Seri, what’s it been like for you, as the art designer and performer, to work on this show?
Seri: It was a crazy experience.I have to draw really graphic, pornographic images with this Ukiyo-e style and I must draw a lot because it’s in my show. I had a lot of crazy dreams about it!
Daniel: I’m so sorry!
I wonder how you will be after the Fringe, Seri.
Seri: Yeah, I don’t know. I can’t imagine. We have a Shunga I made – it’s a crazy image with all of the monsters and stuff – it keeps giving me some nightmares!
SHUNGA ALERT will be at Underbelly Cowgate, Big Belly at 9:40pm, 31st July–24th August (excluding 12th & 19th). Tickets here.
