Laughing Netsuke: Erotic and Humorous Carvings in Japan's Smallest Sculpture

For adult readers. This feature discusses erotic and bawdy netsuke as cultural history. Nothing explicit is described, every figure discussed is an adult, and every image shown is a clothed, comic carving from our own shelves.

Around 1814, in a three-volume book of erotic prints called Young Pines, Hokusai published a picture of a pearl diver and two octopuses that would become his most famous design of its kind. Long before and long after that print, the same joke was being carved small enough to close in a fist: an octopus wrapped round a sleeping mermaid, a giggling Okame holding a tengu's nose, a shell that opens on a couple asleep. These are the erotic and humorous netsuke, the toggles that Edo men hung from their sashes and that later filled the cabinets of Paris, London and Tokyo. Our argument is simple: the risqué netsuke is not a back-room curiosity but the purest form of the Japanese habit of hiding laughter in plain sight, and it deserves to be read with the same seriousness as a scroll.

At a glance

	Erotic and humorous netsuke
What	Miniature carved toggles with bawdy, comic or erotic subjects
Use	Held the cord of a pouch, pipe case or inro at the sash of a kimono
Era	From the seventeenth century; most popular in the Edo period, 1603 to 1867
Typical size	Usually three to four centimetres; many carvings fit inside a palm
Family names	Shunga netsuke, warai (laughing) pieces, trick or karakuri netsuke
Favourite cast	Okame, the tengu mask, the octopus and the diver, the tanuki, the lucky gods
Materials	Boxwood and other hardwoods, old ivory, today often fossil mammoth tusk
Where to see them	Tokyo National Museum, Kyoto, and major museums in London and New York

Bridge: a toggle that carried a joke on the belt of an Edo merchant and now sits in a cabinet in Tokyo is the new Japonisme at its smallest scale, the meeting of the underground and the classical that we set out in our manifesto on the new Japonisme and Japan's soft power.

A toggle with a secret

A netsuke is a miniature sculpture that began life as a fastener. Japanese clothing, first the kosode and then the kimono, had no pockets, so men hung their small belongings from the sash on silk cords: a tobacco pouch, a pipe case, a purse, a seal box, and above all the lacquered medicine case called an inro. The cord ran up behind the sash, and at its top end a carved toggle stopped it from slipping through. That toggle was the netsuke. The word joins two ideas, a root or base and the act of attaching, and the object was born in the seventeenth century as little more than a button.

It did not stay a button. By the later Edo period carvers were turning the toggle into a sculpture in the round, small enough to hold, smooth enough not to snag silk, and sturdy enough to bear the weight of a full inro. The subjects run through the whole of Japanese life: the zodiac animals, the seven lucky gods, heroes from history and legend, tradesmen at work, ghosts, fruit carved at actual size. One family of subjects was always there and always slightly hidden. Collectors call it the shunga netsuke, after the erotic prints known as spring pictures, and it ranges from couples carved without disguise to pieces whose only sexual content is a pun, a gesture or a shape.

See also: netsuke, inro and sagemono, the hanging objects, for the whole system of cord, bead and container.

What a netsuke was for

To understand why a carver would hide a joke in a toggle, picture how the object was worn. The netsuke sat on top of the sash, visible to anyone who looked at the wearer's waist. The container hung below, and between them a sliding bead called an ojime kept the container closed. The three pieces were chosen together and often told a single story; a celebrated eighteenth-century set pairs an eagle netsuke with a deer on the inro below, so that the predator hangs above its prey.

The netsuke was therefore a public object with a private side. Its underside rested against the sash and was rarely seen, and the cord holes were usually cut there. A carver could make the outer face entirely proper and keep the surprise for the side that only the owner would turn over. The same logic governs the Hakata clay figures with a scene painted underneath, which we follow in our feature on Hakata ningyo and their hidden undersides.

The medicine case gave the whole system its importance. Japanese reference works credit the spread of the portable inro to the early Edo taste for carrying everyday remedies for cuts, stomach ache and headache, and say that the first toggles on those cases were often small bronze seals. Carved netsuke followed, and the craft reached its height in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The earliest printed roll call of carvers, published in Osaka in 1781 by Inaba Tsuryu, lists more than fifty netsuke makers by name. For the pipe-and-pouch side of the same costume, see our guide to the kiseru, the tobacco pouch and sagemono.

Laughing pictures in miniature

The Japanese vocabulary for erotic pictures is large, and much of it is cheerful. Spring pictures, or shunga, were also called pillow pictures, secret pictures, the wa mark of the book trade, and warai-e, laughing pictures. Bound books were laughing books. Pictures that only hinted, such as a bathing scene, had a separate name, abuna-e, pictures that walk close to the edge. Our guide to harubon, shunpon and enpon sorts out the words.

The laughter mattered. Japanese reference works record that warriors carried erotic pictures under their armour as a charm against misfortune, under the name kachi-e, victory pictures, and that merchants later kept them in storehouses to ward off fire. The same reference works say that painted erotic handscrolls served as instruction for brides. An erotic image could be a joke, a charm and a lesson at once, and the netsuke inherited all three roles in a form that could be worn every day.

The prints were also under pressure. The Kyoho Reforms of 1722 banned the production of new books without the permission of the city commissioner, and erotic publishing went underground, where it continued to flourish. A carved toggle needed no publisher, no licence and no shop. That may be one reason why the bawdy netsuke survived so comfortably: it was private property, made to order, and small enough to disappear into a sleeve. The full story of the pictures is told in our flagship feature on shunga, Japan's spring pictures.

Shapes that hide things

Netsuke come in a handful of standard forms, and the risqué ones exploit each of them. The commonest is the katabori, a figure carved in the round, usually between one and three inches high. A manju is a thick round disc named after the sweet bun it resembles, sometimes made in two halves. A kagamibuta has a metal lid set into a shallow bowl. A ryusa is a manju carved like lace so that light passes through. A men netsuke is a miniature mask, the largest category after the figure. And a karakuri, a trick netsuke, is any piece with moving parts or a hidden surprise.

Netsuke forms and how a joke hides in each

Form	What it is	Where the joke goes
Katabori	A figure carved in the round	In the pose, or on the underside where the cord holes are
Anabori	A hollowed katabori, often a clam	Inside the shell, seen only when it is tilted to the light
Manju	A round bun-shaped disc, sometimes in two halves	On the inner face, or in a single comic vignette on the outside
Men	A miniature mask	In the face itself: the long tengu nose, the swollen Okame cheeks
Karakuri	A trick piece with moving parts	Behind a panel, a lid or a turning figure
Transformational	An outer figure that opens on an inner one	The inner figure, revealed only when the outer shell is moved

The clam deserves a word. Reference works note that hollowed netsuke most often take the form of a clam, a shell that already has an inside and an outside. A hollow clam netsuke can hold a landscape, a procession or, in its private versions, a couple asleep. The mechanism is the same in every case: the outside tells one story, the inside tells another, and the owner decides who sees which.

See also: our glossary of netsuke terms, for katabori, manju, kagamibuta and the rest.

Okame and the long nose

If one figure rules the humorous netsuke, it is Okame. She is an ancient Japanese mask type: a round face, a small low nose, a small head, hair falling straight and full cheeks pushed high. She goes by many names, Okame, Otafuku, Ofuku in the puppet theatre and Otogoze in the comic kyogen theatre, and she is traced to the goddess Ame-no-Uzume, whose dance in the myth of the sun goddess's cave made the gods laugh. In kyogen she appears as a woman who enjoys her own sensuality without shame. Our page on kyogen, the comic art beside noh explains the theatre that kept her.

Her partner in the joke is the tengu. A tengu mask has a red face and a long nose, and the long nose links it with Sarutahiko, the earthly god who in the old chronicles blocked the way of the heavenly grandson, his nose said to measure seven hand-spans, until Ame-no-Uzume alone dared to face him and persuade him. Sarutahiko is considered the original model of the red-faced, long-nosed tengu of popular imagination. A museum catalogue entry for an early nineteenth-century netsuke in a London collection describes the scene exactly: Okame holds the nose of a tengu mask and, fully aware of what the long nose suggests, giggles behind her sleeve. The entry points out the chain of meaning, from tengu to Sarutahiko to Uzume to Okame.

That is the whole art of the humorous netsuke in one figure. Nothing is shown. A woman holds a mask. The joke is entirely in the viewer's head, and it is a joke with a pedigree that runs back to the founding myths. Our own laughing tengu mask embraced by Otafuku, a contemporary piece in fossil mammoth tusk about 44 millimetres high, is carved in the same tradition. The masks themselves are the subject of our guide to noh masks, their types and makers.

Gods who can take a joke

Japanese religion has always made room for comedy, and the lucky gods are its willing actors. Fukurokuju, the god of long life, is shown bald with long whiskers and an extraordinarily elongated forehead, and he is said to embody the southern pole star. Carvers could not leave that tall head alone. A favourite bawdy subject shows Okame climbing it, or a group of small figures using it as a ladder, and the shape of the head makes the joke without a word. Our netsuke of Otafuku climbing the head of Fukurokuju stands 56 millimetres tall, a slender column of god and goddess.

Ebisu and Daikoku, two of the seven gods of fortune, are often carved together in a friendly struggle, and the rest of the seven are introduced on our page on the seven lucky gods. Hotei, another of the seven, appears in netsuke as often as any of them, and our page on Hotei follows him from China to the Japanese shelf.

The demons get the same treatment. At Setsubun, the eve of spring, households scatter roasted soybeans to drive out misfortune, and the oni, the demon of Japanese folklore, is the target. Netsuke carvers turned the ritual into slapstick. A museum catalogue entry for an early nineteenth-century piece shows Okame pelting an oni with beans while the demon tries to hide beneath her skirts with a mischievous but worried grin. The humour is gentle, the setting is domestic, and the moral is upside down: the demon is the one who looks foolish. The oni also appears in the folk paintings sold to travellers at Otsu from the seventeenth century, where demons were portrayed as monks on an alms round, which is another joke about disguise.

The octopus and the diver

The most famous erotic image in Japanese art involves an octopus, and the netsuke got there first. The print usually called The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife, known in Japan as the octopus and the diver, was published by Hokusai in the 1814 book Young Pines and shows a young ama, one of the sea women famous for diving for pearls, though their main catch was always seafood, entwined with two octopuses. It draws on the legend of the pearl diver who stole a jewel from the dragon king's palace under the sea, and it was not alone: reference works note that early netsuke carvings already showed octopuses with women, and Hokusai's contemporaries made similar pictures.

The octopus in netsuke has its own conventions. Carvers traditionally give it a tube-like siphon that sticks out from the face like a pair of pursed lips, which turns the creature into a comic character. Some netsuke octopuses have nine arms instead of eight, and those, according to the reference books, are usually the ones found embracing beautiful women. The ninth arm is the joke, and it needs no explanation.

The octopus is not always erotic. It appears caught in a trap, sitting in a bowl, or fighting a monkey, and museum collections in London hold examples signed by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century carvers, among them an octopus in a bowl by Morikazu and an octopus caught in a trap by Ohara Mitsuhiro, the shells carved by a second hand. Our monkey wrestling an octopus is the comic version; our sleeping mermaid with an octopus, 51 millimetres long, is the private one. The mermaid herself, the ningyo, is a creature of Japanese folklore with a long history of her own. For the print that made the subject famous, see why you cannot live without Hokusai.

The tanuki and the comic body

No creature in Japanese folklore is funnier than the tanuki, the raccoon dog. Folk sayings give the fox seven disguises and the tanuki eight, and while the fox changes shape to tempt people, the tanuki does it to make them look foolish. In the tale of the lucky tea kettle, a tanuki turns itself into a kettle and cannot quite turn back. A kagamibuta netsuke by the carver Kazunori in a London collection shows that moment, with a silver lid on which the tanuki is halfway to becoming a teakettle, its expression resigned to its fate.

The tanuki's most famous attribute is a joke about the body. Its comically enlarged scrotum is thought to have developed as an image in Kanazawa, probably during the Edo period, where goldsmiths used tanuki pelts when hammering gold nuggets into leaf. In pictures the tanuki may carry it flung over its back like a traveller's pack. It is earthy, not erotic, and it sits squarely in the tradition of the warai, the laugh. The ceramic tanuki of Shigaraki are the best-known modern descendants of that figure, as our story of Shigaraki ware, from sutra jar to tanuki explains.

See also: our okimono and statues almanac, for the larger carvings made to sit on a shelf rather than hang from a sash.

Shrines, festivals and the fertility charm

The frankest carvings in the private room are not erotic pictures at all but fertility charms, and they come from a tradition that is still public in Japan. Every year on 15 March, the Honensai harvest festival at Tagata Shrine in Komaki, Aichi, carries a wooden phallus about two and a half metres long, carved from Japanese cypress and weighing some 280 kilograms, through the streets as a prayer for a rich harvest and for fertility. On the first Sunday in April, the Kanamara festival at Kanayama Shrine in Kawasaki honours the gods of blacksmithing, who are also prayed to for easy childbirth, marital harmony and protection from sexually transmitted infections. The modern festival began in 1969 and now raises money for HIV research.

A small votive carving belongs to that world of shrine and festival rather than to the world of the print. Our boxwood fertility okimono with the face of Otafuku is ten centimetres high and joins the two oldest charms of the Japanese house: the phallic emblem for children and plenty, and the laughing face for good fortune. It is shown in the adults-only room for obvious reasons, but in Japan its relatives are carried in daylight.

From the sash to the cabinet

The Meiji period changed everything. From 1868 Japanese men moved gradually into Western clothes, which had pockets, and the netsuke lost its job. At the same moment foreign visitors discovered it. Netsuke and inro became collectors' objects abroad, many of the finest Edo pieces left the country, and carvers began to work mainly for export. The result is that some of the greatest collections are outside Japan, in the major museums of London, New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

The most famous private collection is one that came home. In 2010 the potter Edmund de Waal published The Hare with Amber Eyes, a family memoir built round 264 netsuke bought in Paris in the late nineteenth century by a member of the Ephrussi family. The collection passed to the Vienna branch of the family; when the Nazis seized the family's property, a maid named Anna hid the netsuke in her mattress. In 1947 an heir took them back to Japan, to Tokyo. Whatever else it is, that story is a reminder that these small objects travel with people and carry their histories.

The Japan thread runs through two great Tokyo collections. Go Seinosuke, a business leader born in 1865 who chaired the Japan Chamber of Commerce, worried that too many netsuke were leaving the country and donated 274 Edo and Meiji pieces to the Tokyo National Museum. The museum also holds about 500 contemporary netsuke collected by Prince and Princess Takamado, of which around 50 are shown in a small dedicated room. To mark its 150th anniversary the museum exhibited all 274 Go pieces from 2 November 2022 to 22 January 2023 and all 500 Takamado pieces from 15 November to 25 December 2022. In Kyoto, the Seishu Netsuke Art Museum, in a late-Edo samurai residence, has held more than 5,000 netsuke with about 400 on show at a time. Collectors abroad have their own society: the International Netsuke Society was founded in 1975 as the Netsuke Kenkyukai Society and still publishes a quarterly journal.

Ivory, mammoth and the law

The materials of netsuke carry history and law. Edo carvers worked boxwood and other hardwoods, and ivory became popular for netsuke, pipes and inlay from the seventeenth century. Today the trade in elephant ivory is restricted by the international convention on endangered species and by national laws; the convention's 1989 decision banned international trade in African elephant ivory after the population fell from about 1.3 million to around 600,000 in a decade.

Japan's own rules are strict. Import and export of elephant ivory, including worked pieces, are prohibited in principle, and domestic trade is allowed only through registered businesses, under an amended law that came into force on 1 June 2018 with registration, record-keeping and much heavier penalties. Fossil mammoth tusk now supplies part of the demand for new netsuke, and large quantities survive in Siberia; one estimate puts the number of mammoths still buried there at ten million or more. Mammoth is not elephant, but some places treat it alike: New York State, for example, requires a permit to sell elephant or mammoth ivory articles, and buyers there must receive a copy of the permit.

Most of the netsuke on our private-room shelves are carved in fossil mammoth tusk or boxwood, and each description names the material. If you live somewhere with special rules, please check them before you ask us to send a carving. Our careful guide to ivory and its substitutes sets out how to tell the materials apart.

A correction to the common story: an ivory-coloured netsuke is not necessarily elephant ivory. Mammoth tusk, hippopotamus tooth, walrus tusk, boar tusk and stag antler have all been used for netsuke. Read the description and the material line, not the colour.

On our shelves

The private room is where our risqué carvings live, in three overlapping shelves. The shunga netsuke shelf holds the openly erotic pieces; the private-room netsuke table mixes them with comic, devotional and animal carvings; and the netsuke, sagemono and inro shelf holds the wider family. The pieces below are all contemporary carvings in the classical tradition unless noted.

Selected comic and private netsuke, checked 14 November 2026

Piece	Subject and joke	Material and size
Kubi-hiki, the neck tug of war	Two friends in a parlour contest, straining and grinning	Mammoth tusk, 42 mm long
Oni beneath a straw hat	The demon in retreat at the bean-throwing festival	Mammoth tusk manju with shell and red inlay
Ebisu and Daikoku with a sea bream	Two lucky gods in a friendly struggle over one fish	Mammoth tusk, 40 mm high
Laughing tengu mask with Otafuku	The long nose and the goddess of mirth	Mammoth tusk, 44 mm high (adults only)
Otafuku climbing Fukurokuju	The tall head of long life used as a ladder	Mammoth tusk, 56 mm high (adults only)
Transformational shunga netsuke	A modest boxwood figure that opens on a private inner figure	Boxwood and mammoth tusk, about 68 mm high, late Showa to Heisei (adults only)
Lovers after the Hana no Nishiki handscroll	A couple wrapped in a peony robe, presented as after a scroll associated with Ogata Korin	Mammoth tusk, 48 mm long (adults only)

The Korin association is the claim of the carving, not ours: the scroll it names is traditionally connected with the painter, and we describe the piece as after that scroll rather than as copying a known original. For the painter himself, Ogata Korin, a leader of the Rinpa school, see our wider art pages through the Japonista Athenaeum.

How to read a risqué netsuke

Five questions help with any comic or erotic netsuke, old or new. First, which side is the front? Find the cord holes; they are usually on the back or underside, and the joke is often near them. Second, what is the pun? Most humorous netsuke rely on a shape, a gesture or a story the viewer already knows, and the subject guides in our collector guides will help you name the cast. Third, is it a toggle or a display piece? A real netsuke has cord holes and no sharp edges; a larger carving without holes is an okimono, made to stand.

Fourth, what is it made of? The material line in a description matters more than the colour, for the reasons above. Fifth, what is the condition? Old wood and ivory develop a soft, warm surface from handling, and fine engraving wears first on the high points. Our guide to Japanese condition ranks explains how such wear is described in Japan, and our authenticity guarantee covers every piece we send.

Reading the carving

Look at	What it tells you
Cord holes	Whether it was made to be worn, and which side is the back
Signature	A carved or inked name; from the eighteenth century netsuke were increasingly signed
Pose and props	The pun: the long nose, the tall head, the ninth arm, the hat that hides a demon
Hidden parts	Whether a panel, shell or outer figure moves, and whether the joinery is tight
Material line	Boxwood, mammoth tusk or another material, and therefore what rules apply where you live

Where the record differs

Points of dispute

Question	One account	Another account
Okame and Uzume	Okame descends from the goddess Ame-no-Uzume	The mask is an independent folk type later linked to the goddess
The tanuki's scrotum	A Kanazawa goldsmiths' image of the Edo period	An older folk joke; the goldsmith story is a later explanation
The octopus and the diver	Hokusai's 1814 print set the subject	Netsuke carvers already used it; Hokusai drew on an existing joke
Hana no Nishiki and Korin	An erotic handscroll by Ogata Korin	A scroll associated with Korin by tradition, not a documented work
Who wore erotic netsuke	Townsmen and merchants above all	All classes, as with shunga prints, which samurai also carried as charms

Facts first, then our reading. The 1781 roll call of carvers, the 1814 print, the 1722 publishing reforms, the Meiji change in dress and the 2018 Japanese ivory law are documented. The origin stories of Okame and of the tanuki's attribute are traditions with several versions, and we have presented them as such.

Our reading

The risqué netsuke is the most honest object in Japanese art. It admits that people laugh at bodies, at gods and at themselves, and it does so in a form that respects privacy: the joke is there for whoever turns the carving over, and for no one else. It belongs with the spring pictures and the clay figures with painted undersides, with the bean-throwing festival and the fertility parade, with Okame's cheeks and Fukurokuju's forehead. It is also a craft of extraordinary discipline, because a carving that hangs from a sash must be smooth, strong and balanced before it is allowed to be funny.

That combination, discipline and mischief, is the new Japonisme in a nutshell. A toggle made to hold a medicine case on the belt of an Edo merchant now sits in museum cabinets in Tokyo and London, in the story of a family that survived the war, and on our own private-room shelf. It still makes people smile. That is our reading.

Answered plainly

What is a shunga netsuke?

A netsuke, a carved toggle for the cords of a hanging container, with an erotic subject or a sexual pun, named after the erotic prints called shunga, or spring pictures.

Why are so many netsuke funny?

Because erotic and comic pictures in Edo Japan were called laughing pictures, and humour, charm and good luck were bound together; a joke on the belt was also a talisman.

Who are Okame and the tengu?

Okame is the round-faced goddess of mirth, traced to Ame-no-Uzume; the tengu is a long-nosed mountain spirit linked with the god Sarutahiko, and the pairing is a gentle bawdy joke.

Are the netsuke on your shelves ivory?

Most of our netsuke are carved in fossil mammoth tusk or boxwood, and every description names the material; please check the rules where you live before ordering.

Who can see the private-room pieces?

Only adults. We show the clothed and comic carvings in pictures and describe the private pieces with restraint.

In the Lexicon: netsuke, shunga.

Further reading

• Netsuke, inro and maki-e, for the collector's guide to the whole costume.
• The Shunga and Hidden Arts room, for the wider private culture archive.
• Utamaro and the bijin-ga print, for the beauties of the pleasure quarter.
• Jizai okimono, articulated metal figures, for another kind of carving that rewards handling.

References

1. Wikipedia, Netsuke
2. Wikipedia (Japanese), Netsuke
3. Kotobank, Netsuke
4. Kotobank, Warai-e (laughing pictures)
5. Wikipedia, Shunga
6. Wikipedia (Japanese), Shunga
7. Wikipedia, Kyoho Reforms
8. Wikipedia, Inro
9. Wikipedia, Ojime
10. Wikipedia, Kiseru
11. Wikipedia (Japanese), Okame
12. Wikipedia, Ame-no-Uzume
13. Wikipedia, Sarutahiko Okami
14. Wikipedia, Tengu
15. Wikipedia (Japanese), Tengu
16. Wikipedia, Kyogen
17. Victoria and Albert Museum, netsuke of Okame with a tengu mask, O75197
18. Victoria and Albert Museum, netsuke of Okame and an oni at Setsubun, O75118
19. Victoria and Albert Museum, octopus in a bowl, signed Morikazu, O228644
20. Victoria and Albert Museum, octopus caught in a trap, signed Mitsuhiro, O90655
21. Victoria and Albert Museum, kagamibuta netsuke of a tanuki tea kettle by Kazunori, O75222
22. Wikipedia, Fukurokuju
23. Wikipedia, Seven Lucky Gods
24. Wikipedia, Setsubun
25. Wikipedia, Otsu-e
26. Wikipedia, The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife
27. Wikipedia, Ama (diving)
28. Wikipedia, Ningyo
29. Wikipedia, Bake-danuki
30. Wikipedia, Japanese raccoon dog
31. Wikipedia, Honen Matsuri
32. Wikipedia, Tagata Shrine
33. Wikipedia, Kanamara Matsuri
34. Wikipedia, The Hare with Amber Eyes
35. Wikipedia, Edmund de Waal
36. Wikipedia (Japanese), Go Seinosuke
37. International Netsuke Society, home page
38. Wikipedia, Ivory trade
39. Wikipedia, Ivory (mammoth ivory)
40. Ministry of the Environment, Japan, Japan's regulation on domestic ivory trade
41. Ministry of the Environment, Japan, Japan's tightened regulations on ivory transactions (1 June 2018)
42. Ministry of the Environment, Japan, FAQ on ivory (6 February 2020)
43. New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, sale of elephant and mammoth ivory
44. Wikipedia, Ogata Korin
45. Wikipedia, Karakuri puppet
46. The British Museum, Noriko Tsuchiya explains the history of netsuke (official video)
47. Images: Japonista product photographs, Tokyo.