At left are the Wagô twins, without their iconographic regalia, but happy in their (platonic?) embrace.

At right is Hukusai's famous remake, called The Wagô Deities of Myriad Good Fortune. Where is the money? It is as if it has transformed into sex.

Is Hokusai's image irreverent? It certainly has an irreverent layer of meaning, which was very common in Tokugawa Japan (we will see more examples). But notice that these two are deities of good fortune. Was there any precedent for such a thing in Japan? Yes. Recall the ancient agricultural deities, statues of which would have been found throughout the countryside in Tokugawa times. These statues typically featured a man and a woman embracing each other, often within a larger image of a phallus or, less commonly, female reproductive organs. And here (below) is a small household shrine featuring the mythical Japanese creation deities Izanagi and Izanami. Notice that their heads. It appears, in other words, that Hokusai was combining an ancient Japanese religious motif with the Chinese-derived Wagô imagery to produce an image that would have had obvious appeal to many Tokugawa-period viewers.