Japan’s Vagina Kayak Artist Fights Back

This woman was arrested for breaking the obscenity law in Japan. Megumi Igarashi is facing prosecution after sailing a kayal shaped like a vagina, and making vagina-themed art. In an exclusive interview, she says her determination to express herself and confront sexism will not waver.

Megumi Igarashi is a Japanese artist who paddles her own canoe. Well, it is more like a vagina kayak. Last July, Igarashi, 42, found herself in troubled waters when she crossed a Tokyo river in a two-meter long 3D printed Kayak modeled after her own genitals.

Although Igarashi completed this vergin voyage unscathed, she was arrested under Japanese obscenity law after she distributed the model of her vagina to fans who had crowdfunded the project.

At the time, the Daily Beast’s Lizzie Crocker took Japanese authorities to task for their draconian and hypocritical enforcement of the law. The city of Kawasaki, for example, holds an annual “Festival of the Steel Phallus”-a fertility celebration in which parade marchers carry large penis-shaped shrines through the streets-without police interference.

Igarashi was released from her first arrest within days after an online petition drew several thousand signatures but she has not stopped making vagina art. As the Japan times reports, she was arrested in December along with a sex shop owner who had displayed Igarashi’s work in a store window.

Do you think Igarashi deserves to be criminally charged? I am not sure but she is certainly a brave woman who keep doing what she thinks is right despite the consequences she has to suffer and she know what could happen because it seems like the Japanese police and the law system in Japan are especially scrutinizing her case. I agree that it is probably because Igarashi is a female. It is crazy that Japanese police don’t care about this penis festival, where young girls are sucking on penis lollipop, everything shaped like penis..to me, it is very offensive and it is very hypocritical for Japanese government to single out Igarashi’s case to criminally charge her.