Rokudenashiko

Megumi Igarashi (五十嵐恵, Igarashi Megumi, born 1972), who uses the pseudonym Rokudenashiko (ろくでなし子 or 碌でなし子), is a Japanese sculptor and manga artist who creates works that feature female genitalia and are often modeled after her own vulva. Rokudenashiko considers it her mission to reclaim female genitalia as part of women's bodies and demystify them in Japan's male dominated society, where she believes that they are "overly hidden" and marginalized as “taboo” and “obscene” in comparison to phallic imagery. As such, the artist has created a variety of different representations of manko, the Japanese slang for vagina or pussy, using representations of her own body as the raw material to emphasize as return to experience within art and manga. Rokudenashiko has been called an international symbol of “manko positivity.”The pseudonym Rokudenashiko translates to “good-for-nothing-girl,” a name the artist made up by combining rokudenashi (which translates to “good-for-nothing,” “bastard,” “ne’er-do-well”) and the diminutive feminine suffix -ko (usually translated as “girl” or “child”).In 2014, Rokudenashiko was arrested following the creation of Man-Boat (short for manko boat), a kayak with an opening attachment modeled after a 3-D scan of her own vagina, for which she drew financial support from an online crowdfunding platform. Accused on the grounds of posting the downloadable 3-D scanned digital data of her vagina for the public as part of her crowdfunding campaign, Rokudenashiko became the first woman in Japanese history tried on the grounds of obscenity. The ensuing legal battle attracted a lot of media attention in Japan and internationally, where the artist amassed public support and became the subject of online protests about Japan's inconsistent obscenity laws. In 2016, Rokudenashiko was fined 400,000 yen (around US$3,660) for making the data publicly available.