Meiji and Taishō: Itō Seiu and the art of seme-e

When the shogunate fell in 1868, the world described in the previous essay began to disappear. Within a few decades judicial torture was abolished, the capture rope was on its way to being replaced by handcuffs, and Japanese readers were discovering European theories of sexuality. Out of this changing landscape came the figure most histories of kinbaku treat as its starting point: the painter Itō Seiu (伊藤晴雨, 1882–1961). This essay covers the Meiji (1868–1912) and Taishō (1912–1926) eras and the early Shōwa years up to the end of the war, the span in which Itō did his central work.

The end of Edo justice

The Meiji government rebuilt the legal system on Western models. According to the legal historian Ishii Ryōsuke in Nipponica, the provisions that had allowed torture were removed by a government proclamation in 1879, ending the practice at least on paper; Heibonsha’s Sekai Daihyakka Jiten gives the same year. Rope remained part of policing for longer. Japanese Wikipedia reports that the police kept teaching hojōjutsu after the Restoration and only dropped it from arrest training once handcuffs became common in the Shōwa era.

So by the early twentieth century, the Edo punishments that had once been public spectacle were within living memory but no longer part of daily life. That made them a subject for antiquarians, storytellers and artists.

Sexology and the “hentai” boom

A second change came through books. The historian Mark McLelland, in “A Short History of ‘Hentai’” (2006), describes how German sexology reached Japan from the middle of the Meiji era, partly through the army doctor and novelist Mori Ōgai. Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis was published in Japanese under a title that popularized the phrase hentai seiyoku, “perverse sexual desire”, and the word hentai gradually took on the sexual meaning it still has.

By the 1920s, McLelland writes, at least ten Japanese journals were devoted to “perverse desire”, among them Hentai shiryō, launched in 1926, and Gurotesuku in 1928. The era’s taste for the erotic, the grotesque and the absurd is often summed up as ero-guro-nansensu. That climate did not last: McLelland notes that state censorship tightened as Japan prepared for war in the 1930s and that, with paper rationed, much of this publishing had largely stopped by around 1933.

Itō Seiu: a craftsman’s training

Itō was born Itō Hajime in Asakusa, Tokyo, in 1882, according to Japanese Wikipedia. As a child he studied painting with Nozawa Teiu and was then apprenticed to an ivory carver; English Wikipedia says he took the art name Seiu at thirteen. He made his living as a commercial artist. Nippon.com describes him beginning with theater signboards before becoming known for illustrations to storytellers’ tales and serialized newspaper fiction, and English Wikipedia dates his newspaper work to around 1907.

His range was wide. Nippon.com notes that he is sometimes called the last ukiyo-e painter, and that a set of nineteen of his ghost paintings was shown at the Edo-Tokyo Museum in 2016. But he is remembered above all for two genres the same article names together: shibari-e, pictures of bound women, and seme-e, pictures of torment.

Research into Edo punishment

What set Itō apart was that his pictures rested on research. Japanese Wikipedia says that after the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake destroyed his belongings he set about recording Edo-period customs, and that his torment pictures came to be grounded in historical study rather than fancy. English Wikipedia’s article on hojōjutsu says he studied the capture-rope art, and Pen Online presents kinbaku as growing out of the Edo-period methods linked to it, with Itō as the person who made it an erotic art form.

The National Diet Library catalogue shows the scale of this work. It holds:

• Iroha-biki Edo to Tōkyō fūzoku yashi, a multi-volume, alphabetically arranged history of Edo and Tokyo customs, issued from 1927;
• Seme no hanashi (責の話, “On torment”), 1929;
• Bijin ranbu (美人乱舞), 1932;
• Nihon keibatsu fūzoku zushi (日本刑罰風俗図史), an illustrated history of Japanese punishment written with the folklorist Fujisawa Morihiko, 1948;
• Seme no kenkyū (責の研究, “A study of torment”), in an edition Itō published himself in 1950.

Japanese Wikipedia describes Seme no kenkyū as a well-regarded book of its day that was banned when it first appeared in 1928; the National Diet Library record cited above is for the 1950 edition.

Working from life

To get bodies and rope right, Itō worked from models. English Wikipedia describes his method for depicting Edo torture scenes: he tied a model, had the pose photographed, and painted from the photographs. Japanese Wikipedia names Sasaki Kaneyo, known as Oyo, as the model for torment pictures he made in his thirties, and says the photographs also spared his models from holding difficult positions for long. His second wife, Sahara Kise, also posed for him; Pen Online dates his first suspension photographs with her to around 1920. A selection of these photographs was published much later, in 1996, as the Shinchōsha volume Seme-e no onna: Itō Seiu shashinchō, according to the National Diet Library.

Itō’s subject brought him into conflict with the authorities. English Wikipedia says he became a target of the censors in 1930 and that this hurt him financially; Pen Online describes his work as widely censored in the 1930s. Japanese Wikipedia adds that he lost much of his work in the 1945 air raids on Tokyo.

Why he matters to kinbaku

English Wikipedia and Pen Online both report that Itō is recognized today as the “father of modern kinbaku”. His influence can be traced in the people who built the postwar scene. Japanese Wikipedia’s biography of the illustrator and editor Minomura Kō (Suma Toshiyuki) says he studied Itō’s bondage sketches as a young man, and the critic Masami Akita, writing in 1995, describes Minomura as Itō’s pupil. Japanese Wikipedia says he published little after the war, although the national catalogue does list postwar titles such as the 1948 punishment history and the 1950 edition of Seme no kenkyū, and Pen Online reports that he founded a theater group devoted to torment scenes in 1953.

Interest in him has never faded. The novelist Dan Oniroku wrote a book about his life, Itō Seiu monogatari, published by Kawade Shobō Shinsha in 1987, and English Wikipedia notes that the Nikkatsu studio released a feature film based on his life in 1977. Itō died in 1961.

Itō left a large body of pictures, writings and photographs on the bound figure, and the editors and illustrators who shaped the postwar magazines had grown up with that work. Their story is the subject of the next essay, Postwar Japan: kasutori magazines and Kitan Club.