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hateyrguts:

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Here’s your Wikipedia-cribbed (f)art history lesson of the day.

During Japan’s Edo period (1603–1868), unknown artists created elaborate scenes called, appropriately, he-gassen, or “fart battle,” in response to Japan’s xenophobic attitude toward Europeans. The Tokugawa shogunate ruthlessly persecuted Christians, and by the middle of the 17th century, few foreigners were allowed in restricted sections of Japan. Only the Chinese, the Dutch East India Company and a group of English traders could avoid arrest and execution without trial.

The xenophobia was pretty silly, these artists thought. It might as well be a fart battle. Hence these images of people farting on horseback, farting on cats, farting through tables, fanning farts back at the farters, testing out fart levitation, storing and unleashing farts from a big fart bag, farting down a building, farting down trees and just general happy fartery.

It’s actually quite sophisticated. He-gassen is awfully clever scatological satire, in the vein of Rabelais or Jonathan Swift, who filled his British government–trolling Gulliver’s Travels with lots and lots of detailed visuals of poop and pee and gas. Throughout history, artists and writers have used excrement to symbolize corruption. It works so well because even if you don’t quite get the significance, you can laugh and simply enjoy being human.

SEE MORE FART SCROLLS RIGHT HERE…

:-0

i didn’t read it but look, farts lol

i am obligated on so many levels to reblog this