A Japanese Artist arrested for making 3D Boat that Looks like her Vagina

Megumi Igarashi, a Japanese artist  makes work modelled on her vagina and have been charged with obscenity after she made  a canoe modelled on her genitals. But she says her work is supposed to provoke laughter, not offence.
 

She was arrested since early December, was formally charged under obscenity laws yesterday, according to reports. Meanwhile  she has been briefly detained by police last summer for exhibiting her work in a Tokyo sex shop and for emailing out blueprints for creating her vagina canoe.

“My works are all meant to induce friendly laughter because they involve cutely decorated sexual organs. The works are not obscene,” the artist said in response to the charges, according to the Asahi Shimbun newspaper.

 December 3,  police re-arrested her and explained the grounds for her detention as the distribution of 3D data of her scanned vagina, which was the digital basis for her kayak project. Japan is famous for its buoyant porn industry but obscenity laws still forbid either photographs or other depiction of actual genitalia.

“I don’t believe my vagina is anything obscene,” Igarashi said in a July press conference after her release, the Japan Times reported. “I was determined I would never yield to police power.”
Writing on her website Igarashi describes her project: “Why did I start making this kind of art pieces? That was because I had not seen pussy of others and worried too much about mine. I did not know what a pussy should look like."

If convicted of distributing or holding obscene images for the purposes of selling, Igarashi could face up to two years in prison and a fine of up to £13,400 (2.5m Yen).