Félicien Rops was dabbling in tentacle porn in the 1890s. He would probably have come across Hokusai’s print.
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This is the thing, we’re talking about cartoon images of fictional characters indulging in sexual behaviour, so who, exactly, is being exploited? It’s ink on paper, not flesh and blood with feelings and emotions.
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That’s a thorny issue, and I guess it depends on whether you believe images portraying sex acts with simulated minors (as opposed to actual minors, whether real people or pictures) is okay. And how young (in the images) is too young? High schoolers? Middle Schoolers? Elementary schoolers? Even younger?
No answers, just my personal opinion in the matter.
Here’s Neil Gaiman on this very subject, with an essay on freedom of expression that I think Boing Boing covered at the time.
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That article notes “The definition of “obscenity”, which is absent from the text of the code itself, has developed through a series of judicial decisions.” I suspect that a more authoritative answer can be found in
https://scholars.duke.edu/display/pub1019934
which I can’t read.
So yes, the law criminalizing obscenity dates to 1907; the decision defining pubic hair as obscene may be from a later period.
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From
And that cite is to Jay Rubin’s Injurious to Public Morals: Writers and the Meiji State. (I love playing Google Book’s preview against Amazon’s “Look Inside” Feature")
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