Postwar Japan: kasutori magazines and Kitan Club

Defeat in 1945 brought a sudden opening of Japanese publishing after the wartime restrictions described at the close of the previous essay. Within a few years a cheap, disreputable magazine trade had grown into a specialist press for readers with “perverse” tastes, and in its pages rope bondage became something many strangers could look at, write about and discuss together. The magazine at the center of that story is Kitan Club (奇譚クラブ), published in Osaka from 1947 to 1975.

Kasutori magazines

The first wave was the kasutori magazines. The Seisenban Nihon Kokugo Daijiten defines them as magazines built on vulgar, sensational articles and explains the name as a joke: kasutori was a rough postwar liquor, three cups of which knocked a drinker out, and these magazines typically folded by their third issue. Japanese Wikipedia dates the boom to roughly 1946–1949 and describes the typical contents: reports from the pleasure quarters, lurid crime stories, confessions and erotic fiction, printed on poor recycled paper. Publishing was nominally free, but the Occupation still enforced a press code, and the same article records that the magazine Ryōki was prosecuted for obscenity in 1947.

From pulp to a “perverse” press

As the boom faded, a narrower kind of magazine took its place. Mark McLelland, in “A Short History of ‘Hentai’” (2006), describes a subgenre that by the early 1950s focused on hentai seiyoku, “perverse desire”, covering homosexuality, fetishes and sadomasochism side by side. He names titles such as Ningen tankyū and Amatoria. Their distinctive feature was the reader: alongside doctors’ and writers’ commentary, they printed letters and confessions from people who described themselves as abnormal, and readers with quite different interests shared the same pages. McLelland notes that sadomasochism was a strong theme from the start and became the press’s main focus by the 1960s.

The historian Kawahara Azumi, whose research project on Kitan Club calls it the first historical study of sadomasochism in Japan, groups Kitan Club, Ningen tankyū and Amatoria together as a first generation of these magazines in her 2024 book SM no shisōshi.

Kitan Club

According to Japanese Wikipedia, Kitan Club began in November 1947 as an ordinary kasutori magazine founded by Yoshida Minoru, a former newspaper reporter. Kawahara confirms that it was a monthly from the start. Its publisher appeared under several names, including Akebono Shobō.

The magazine’s change of direction is usually tied to the illustrator and editor Minomura Kō, whose real name was Suma Toshiyuki and who also drew as Kita Reiko. Kawahara shows that he was involved from at least the October 1948 issue, which carries his cover, and that he worked for the publisher from October 1948 to June 1953. Japanese Wikipedia says that, with sales slipping, the magazine shifted in 1951 toward the sadomasochistic themes Suma specialized in and won readers, and that from the combined May–June 1952 issue, relaunched in a smaller A5 format, it became a magazine devoted mainly to sadism, masochism and fetishism. English Wikipedia dates its sadomasochistic articles, drawings and photographs, including bondage images, from 1952. VICE credits a 1952 Kita Reiko illustration of ten bound women with lifting circulation and setting that course, and the critic Masami Akita, writing in 1995, likewise says that strong sales of the issue carrying this picture led the publisher to turn the magazine gradually toward readers with “abnormal” tastes.

How much of this was Suma’s doing is disputed. The writer and rope artist Nureki Chimuo (Iida Toyoichi) repeatedly described Suma as the man who made the magazine, an account that spread widely. Kawahara argues that this overstates his role: Suma was on the staff for only about a year of the A5 period, his later magazines never matched Kitan Club, and the magazine thrived for decades after he left. She suggests that the founder Yoshida, who ran it for 28 years, deserves more of the credit, and notes that Kitan Club already showed a sympathetic attitude to sexual minorities before Suma arrived.

A community on paper

Kitan Club worked as a meeting place. Japanese Wikipedia describes it as a hub where anonymous readers exchanged letters and information, one of the few communities available to people interested in SM before the 1960s, and puts its circulation in the early 1950s at an estimated 50,000 to 80,000 copies. McLelland highlights its round-table discussions and readers’ columns, which worked as personal ads and as a place to share fantasies.

Rope was one strand among many, but an important one. Kawahara notes that Tsujimura Takashi, an early contributor, worked on the magazine’s bondage photo spreads and later wrote a long-running photo series for it. The critic Masami Akita, writing in 1995, says Kitan Club was also where the American fetish artist John Willie’s bondage work first appeared in Japan, and VICE describes an exchange of material between Japanese magazines and American titles such as Willie’s Bizarre. Itō Seiu, whose work is described in the previous essay, was still publishing in these years; the National Diet Library holds his illustrated history of Japanese punishment, written with Fujisawa Morihiko, from 1948.

The magazine also launched writers. Japanese Wikipedia records that Dan Oniroku’s novel Hana to hebi and Numa Shōzō’s Kachikujin Yapū first appeared in its pages, and Kawahara counts Dan among the professional SM authors the magazine produced. Many contributors wrote under pen names; Kawahara has shown, for example, that the contributor who wrote as Azuma Arata was the author Murakami Nobuhiko.

Censorship and rivals

The authorities took notice. Kawahara reports that the March 1954 issue was banned within days of going on sale on suspicion of violating Article 175 of the Penal Code, the obscenity provision, and Japanese Wikipedia lists a second ban in May 1955. Magazines that showed sadism, and especially the binding of women, were attacked not only as obscene but as harmful books at odds with the ideals of postwar democracy, Kawahara writes.

Suma had meanwhile moved to Tokyo. After leaving Kitan Club he helped launch a rival, Fūzoku zōshi, in 1954, which was itself hit by repeated bans and closed the same year, according to Kawahara. In 1956 he founded Uramado with the publisher Kubo Shoten, and McLelland dates that magazine to 1956–1965. Iida Toyoichi, later known as Nureki Chimuo, appears as its editor from the November 1961 issue and became editor-in-chief in January 1962, according to Kawahara. Kawahara explains that Uramado was renamed Suspense Magazine in 1965 and dressed up as a mystery magazine to avoid prosecution. Another title, Fūzoku kitan, began in January 1960. Iida later recorded this world in a book of interviews, 『奇譚クラブ』から『裏窓』へ (“From Kitan Club to Uramado”), published by Ronsōsha in 2013; Kawahara cautions that his memories, like all such testimony, need to be checked against the magazines themselves.

The end of an era

By the late 1960s the market was changing. Kawahara describes an SM boom around that time, driven by Tsujimura’s television appearances, the book edition of Kachikujin Yapū and the success of Hana to hebi. Kitan Club ran until March 1975, according to Japanese Wikipedia; McLelland calls it the longest-lived title of the perverse press.

For almost three decades, these magazines were where Japanese rope bondage was drawn, photographed, written about and debated in print. The commercial SM magazines and pink films that followed are the subject of the next essay in this series. For how the words kinbaku and shibari came into use, see Kinbaku vs shibari.