sculpture;
votive offering
- Museum number
- OA+.7140
- Description
-
Phallus. Made of wood.
- Production date
- 19thc
- Dimensions
-
Length: 0.20 metres
- Curator's comments
- Veneration of models of male and female sex organs, or natural features that suggested their forms, was a significant strand of traditional native religion (see Clark et al 2013, pp. 364–7). One of several roughly hewn wooden phalluses collected by Europeans in Japan in the late nineteenth century. All but one is known to have come from Azuma Gongen shrine, Nagaura village. The shrine was moved to accommodate a naval base in 1900 and the original location is now part of Yokosuka city, Kanagawa prefecture. The two smallest wooden phalluses (far right) are from the collection of 434 items described as ‘Symbols of the Early Worship of Mankind’, given in 1865 to the British Museum by George Witt (1804–69) and listed in the catalogue privately published by him in 1866. It is likely that they were collected by Adam Scott (dates unknown), a British merchant who visited the shrine and made sketches and painted watercolours there in May 1864, now preserved in the bound albums in the Witt collection (Clark et al 2013, cat. 158). In Witt’s published catalogue he attests that two Europeans (including ?Admiral Kupfer, who is mentioned in the albums) had witnessed the procession of a newly married couple to present a phallus at the shrine. This appears third from the right in the photographed group of six phalluses. Three of this group are inscribed in ink: far left in Japanese, ‘Chu-goro- of Nagaura village’ (OA+7141); second from left in Japanese, ‘Donated to Azuma Gongen [shrine] by Gorohachi of this place [Nagaura?]’ (OA+7142); and third from left in Roman letters, ‘Adzuma [sic] shrine near Yokohama, Dr J Anderson, Feb. 1887’ (OA+7143). Phallic worship was of particular fascination to Witt and his European informants. However, the Witt albums also record the presence within the precincts of Tsurugaoka Hachiman shrine in Kamakura of ‘The Stone of Virtue, a natural image in stone of the female vulva’, still extant. [TC]
- Location
- Not on display
- Exhibition history
-
Exhibited:
2017-2018 2 Nov-8 Apr, BM Gallery 35, Living with gods
2013 3 Oct - 2014 5 Jan, London, BM, Shunga: Sex and pleasure in Japanese art, 1600-1900
- Department
- Asia
- Registration number
- OA+.7140