The Wild History of Tentacle Porn

To understand The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife, the famous 1814 erotic woodblock print that supposedly inspired Japanese tentacle porn, we first have to talk about Mad Men. Katsushika Hokusai’s work depicting a nightmare sequence of a woman being sexually assaulted by two octopuses doesn’t really make frequent appearances in mainstream media for obvious reasons. But the AMC period drama not only introduced the art piece to a larger audience, it also captured the west’s attitude toward it.

Originally something of a metaphor for the testosterone-fueled energy of the advertising business—ironic, since the print’s owner, Robert Morse’s Bert Cooper, canonically has no testicles—The Dream later becomes the property of Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss). Her ultimate acceptance of the 19^th-century male gaze-centered piece symbolizes a growing ease with her aggressively masculine profession in an interesting character arc undercut by one tiny problem. The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife doesn’t mean any of that. It can’t. It actually celebrates female pleasure, it might be queer-coded, and it definitely is a parody in the vein of Game of Bones, with dialogue on par with “winter is cumming.”

Also, its name isn’t even The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife. It’s called Tako to Ama (“The Octopuses and the Diver.”) The new title that arrange-married the diver to an unseen man and turned the entire scene into a bad dream is an invention by western scholars, who also forced the rape interpretation on it because of their unfortunate cultural background. In the west, octopuses and squids have long been creatures to fear once popularly known as “devilfish.” From H.G. Wells’ tentacled Martian death-engines in The War of the Worlds to Jules Verne’s monster “poulpe” (octopus) in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, the dark, western take on Hokusai’s work basically wrote itself… because its authors couldn’t read the Japanese writing on the print.

In Japanese erotic prints, there are many ways to signal female pleasure, like with the image of used paper handkerchiefs strewn around a copulating woman. However, there was no need for that in Tako to Ama because the text surrounding the subjects—which, by the way, is full of onomatopoeia for sucking, licking, and gushing—makes it clear that the woman is enjoying the cephalopod oral sex. (All memories of tentacles in the print being used as substitute penises is the Mandela Effect.)

The lack of penetration might actually be a visual play on words. During the Edo Period (1603 – 1868), “tako” (octopus) was a popular slang term for “vagina,” making the octopus-woman coupling one giant pun on homoerotic desires. The woman in the print reinforces this interpretation since ama divers primarily collected abalone, with the mollusks’ Japanese name (awabi) also being a euphemism for “vagina” going all the way back to the 8^th century.

But there is more to it than that. A popular source of the image of ama divers comes from Taishokan (“The Great Woven Cap”), a dramatic folktale from the 14^th century. It tells the story of a diver later known as Princess Tamatori, who sacrifices her life to steal back a jewel from the underwater palace of Ryujin, the fearsome Dragon God of the sea. It’s a multilayered fable of sacrifice and a celebration of invisible female labor since the death of the lowborn ama helps the mighty and noble Fujiwara clan prosper.

This is what Tako to Ama ultimately was parodying. The print was a humorous vulgarization of a borderline-sacred story where the Tamatori stand-in gets captured by the cephalopod agents of the sea deity and trades in orgasms for her mission. This was as obvious to the people of 19^th-century Japan as Homelander being a parody of Superman on The Boys is obvious to us. However, Homelander’s breastfeeding fetish was probably far more shocking than anything in Hokusai’s work.

In the grand scheme of Japan’s erotic art, Taka to Ama is incredibly tame. It was far from the weirdest animal-on-human sex scene, lest we forget the trend most likely started by Katsukawa Shun’ei in his 1789 collection Ominameshi of men having sex with stingrays. Parodies? In 1826, Utagawa Kunisada produced a trick flipbook painting skewering the famous tragedy of star-crossed lovers Ohan and Choemon, which, instead of a double-suicide, ends with Ohan turning into a specter and biting off Choemon’s penis. Puns? In 1771, Katsukawa Shunsho parodied the legend of the eight-headed kaiju Yamata no Orochi, made entirely of penises in his version and named Yamara no Orochi, since “mara” was the Edo-period slang term for “penis” (with apologies to all women named “Mara” everywhere.)

The main reason Hokusai’s print is so well-known today is because of the artist’s success outside of the erotic realm, especially with his The Great Wave off Kanagawa, the image you put up on your dorm walls when you felt you were too good for a Boondock Saints poster.

That is why any claims of a direct connection between Hokusai and modern tentacle erotica are suspect at best. Just as a reminder, Tako to Ama doesn’t portray rape, while a lot of tentacle hentai very much does. So, where did the latter come from? Its earliest ancestor was probably a comic from the 1968 Weekly Manga Q Special Edition about tentacled monsters chasing attractive women. Then in 1973, legendary manga artist Osamu Tezuka published The Returnees where a female character is impregnated by a tentacled creature, but none of these examples were explicit pornographic depictions focusing on pleasure. That first started with Toshio Maeda.

Still known as “The Tentacle Master,” he is largely credited as the creator of modern tentacle porn. A lot of sources say that the first comic of this kind was his Urotsukidoji (1984 – 1986) but writer and comic/animation researcher Kimi Rito found an earlier work by Toshio Meada featuring tentacle tongues and tentacles as penis substitutes in a pornographic setting.

According to his research, the first mainstream tentacle porn comic was Maeda’s SEX Tearing from 1976. Interestingly, in an interview with Kimi, Maeda claimed no knowledge of Hokusai’s Tako to Ama. He apparently chose to draw sex scenes with tentacles because it opened up a brand-new world of different poses without violating Japan’s censorship laws.

Does that mean there is no link between Hokusai’s print and modern tentacle porn? Not necessarily. In the late 1970s, Hideo Azuma, a big name in hentai, was reportedly very aware of Hokusai and drew frequent homages to Tako to Ama.

So, Hokusai’s DNA is there in tentacle hentai, but it would be going too far to call him the father of the genre. If anyone or anything deserves that title, it’s probably Japan’s stern censorship laws that forced artists to look for creative workarounds around a ban on explicit depictions of sex acts, and using the strict definition of “sex” as “penis in vagina” to their advantage.