SM magazines and pink film: the 1960s to the 1980s

Between the early 1960s and the late 1980s, kinbaku moved out of the letters pages of a few reader magazines and into newsstands, cinemas and, finally, home video. The people who tied for the camera in these years shaped what many still picture when they hear the word. This essay follows that shift through three media: SM magazines, pink film and adult video.

From reader magazines to a newsstand genre

The 1950s magazines that first gave kinbaku a public home are covered in the previous essay. Two of them carried on into this period. Kitan Club, founded in Osaka in 1947, had begun turning to sadism and masochism in 1951, relaunched as a mainly SM magazine with its May–June 1952 issue and kept publishing until March 1975, according to Japanese Wikipedia. Uramado, which the writer Iida Toyoichi edited, closed in February 1965 and was followed by a successor title, Suspense Magazine, which ran until December 1980, as the historian Kawahara Azumi records in her study of Iida’s career. The publisher’s description of Iida’s posthumous memoir notes that these magazines had admirers among writers such as Mishima Yukio and Shibusawa Tatsuhiko.

Kitan Club was also where Dan Oniroku’s best-known novel began. He published Flower and Snake (Hana to Hebi) under the pen name Hanamaki Kyōtarō in the combined August and September issue of 1962. Japanese Wikipedia describes the response as strong enough to turn it into a serial that ran, on and off, for about thirteen years.

The SM magazine boom of the 1970s

The decade that followed brought a run of new titles with “SM” in their names. Kawahara’s chronology dates SM Select, from the publisher Tōkyō Sanseisha, to November 1970, SM Fan to a first issue in December 1971, SM Collector, from Sun Shuppan, to December 1972, and Ab Hunter, from the same house, to June 1974. Dan Oniroku founded his own magazine, SM King, in 1972; English Wikipedia says it lasted until 1974. S&M Sniper followed in 1979, according to a 2025 gallery release about the artist who painted its covers. A Kinbaku Today roundtable lists more than a dozen further SM titles from the decade and credits the editor Miyasaka Shin with bringing SM magazines into the open during the boom.

These magazines mixed fiction, illustration and photographs, and the photo spreads needed someone to do the tying. Kawahara draws on the memoir of a founding editor of SM Select: at first the illustrator Suma Toshiyuki tied for its photo shoots, but he left to help start the rival SM Collector, which used the same illustrators, writers and photographers. From November 1972 Iida took over the tying for SM Select. His working notebooks, which Kawahara used, show him tying for SM Fan shoots from July 1972. By 1974 he averaged about two shoots a month for SM Fan and four for SM Select, with occasional work for SM King, and by 1979 and 1980 he was tying at eleven to thirteen shoots a month while still writing fiction.

Iida first used the name Nureki Chimuo in the February 1973 issue of SM Select, Kawahara notes, in a column describing a shoot he had worked on. Kinbaku Today’s roundtable gives the same month for the name’s first appearance and dates his partnership with the photographer Sugiura Norio to 1974. Kawahara argues that the visual language Iida built in these years had a deep influence on how kinbaku looks today. She also stresses that he refused titles such as “master”, calling himself only the person in charge of the tying.

The boom did not last. Kawahara notes that Bessatsu SM Fan ended in August 1985 and Shōsetsu SM Fan in September 1985, and that Shōsetsu SM Select closed in November 1987. She reads these closures as the first signs that the SM magazine boom was fading.

Pink film

Cinema took a parallel path. English Wikipedia dates the first true pink film, Kobayashi Satoru’s Flesh Market (Nikutai no Ichiba), to 1962. Pink films were low-budget erotic features, about an hour long, made mostly by small independent studios and shown in triple bills. Wakamatsu Kōji, who set up his own studio in 1965, became known for films that mixed sex, violence and politics.

Tani Naomi, who would become the defining face of rope on screen, began in this independent sector. Her debut was in 1967, and Wikipedia reports that she made more than two hundred films before joining a major studio, earning the nickname “Queen of Pink”. In 1972 she directed two films based on stories by Dan Oniroku.

Nikkatsu Roman Porno and the SM line

In November 1971 the major studio Nikkatsu abandoned action films and launched its Roman Porno series. According to Wikipedia, the studio released around three of these films a month for seventeen years. Directors had wide creative freedom as long as each film met a quota of erotic scenes.

Rope arrived as a genre of its own in 1974. Tani agreed to work for Nikkatsu on the condition that her first starring film there be based on a Dan Oniroku novel, and the result was Flower and Snake, directed by Konuma Masaru. Konuma also directed Wife to Be Sacrificed the same year; Wikipedia calls it Nikkatsu’s biggest hit of 1974 and the film that made Tani the studio’s first “SM Queen”. The relationship with the novelist was not always easy. English Wikipedia reports that Dan disliked the changes the film made to his story and refused to take part in Wife to Be Sacrificed, while also giving Nikkatsu exclusive rights to his novels and staying associated with the studio for more than ten years. His script structure became a template for its SM films. Japanese Wikipedia describes Nikkatsu’s SM films as a major source of income for the studio in the 1970s and 1980s.

Tani’s later SM films included Rope Cosmetology (1978) and her final starring role, Rope and Skin (1979), both directed by Nishimura Shōgorō. She retired suddenly in 1979. By the late 1970s, according to research by Roland Domenig cited on Wikipedia, pink film and Roman Porno together made up more than seventy percent of Japan’s annual film output.

Adult video and the end of an era

Home video changed the economics. Wikipedia reports that adult videos spread with the VCR in the early 1980s and by 1982 had about the same share of the adult market as theatrical films. Stricter censorship rules agreed in 1984 cut theatrical profits sharply, and when the film classification body Eirin tightened its rules again in 1988, Nikkatsu ended Roman Porno. By the end of the decade video had become the main form of adult film in Japan.

The rope specialists moved with the medium. Kawahara found that Iida worked on shoots for the label Art Video from 1982, and that Art Video made at least ten bondage videos in 1983. In the late 1980s he set up his own labels; by 1999 he had produced more than three hundred titles. Yukimura Haruki photographed for S&M Sniper from 1982, began making videos in the mid-1980s and founded his own production company, Sunset Color, in 1987, according to a biography published by Shibari Dojo. Japanese Wikipedia credits Akechi Denki, who began working in the 1970s, with a large body of adult video work and a major role in popularizing kinbaku in Japan.

Kinbaku Today’s roundtable describes the 1990s as the decade in which SM videos began to put named “kinbaku masters” at the center, and links the later decline of both magazines and videos to the rise of the internet. Those developments, and the stage shows that ran alongside the magazines, are the subject of the next essays.

Sources and disagreements

Most English-language accounts of this period rely on film histories and fan research. Kawahara’s study is one of the few scholarly works built on primary records, Iida’s own notebooks and magazine runs, and its dates are used here where accounts differ. Dates for individual magazines can vary between catalogues; where only one source gives a date, it is attributed above.