Yoshiyuki introduced the series for the first time in a 1972 issue of Shukan Shincho, a popular Japanese magazine that freely explored issues considered taboo in the country. At that time, premarital sex and homosexuality were widely criticized in Japan and young couples frequently lived with their parents until marriage. Parks like Chuo in Tokyo have offered a clandestine place where couples could get to know each other freely by temporarily escaping from the disciplinary forms imposed by a legislature; recalled by the legal scholar Katherine Biber in her 2015 essay “Peeping: Open Justice and Law’s Voyeurs “: it was “illegal to engage in public indecency. … It was illegal to have sex in the park, it was illegal to watch couples having sex in the park, it was illegal to photograph them and it was also illegal to show or distribute those photographs.” (1970).
Also provocatively playing on the illicit nature of the project, the publication of the images by Yoshiyuki (1972) had and keeps on having a great success, making this author and this project an object of worship. If Yoshiyuki’s photos had the audacity to exploit timeless human impulses, vulnerabilities and perversions, they also have the merit of having brought to light one of the many aspects of human nature, which in the incessant search for a pleasure and a sense does not cease to experiment and construct imaginaries.