SM no Shisōshi SMの思想史
Kawahara Azumi's 2024 scholarly history of SM thought in postwar Japan, the first systematic study of Kitan Club and its rival magazines as historical sources.
SM no Shisōshi: Sengo Nihon ni okeru Shihai to Bōryoku o meguru Yume to Yokubō (“An Intellectual History of SM: Dreams and Desires about Domination and Violence in Postwar Japan”) is a 403-page monograph by the historian Kawahara Azumi, published by Seikyūsha in May 2024.
The publisher’s description starts from a gap in the record: Kitan Club was famous by reputation, yet its contents had never been studied seriously. The book’s first part is a study of sources. Kawahara goes through seven postwar magazines of the 1950s issue by issue, traces how they borrowed from and imitated one another, and argues for Kitan Club’s value as a historical source. The chapters cover a first generation of magazines (Kitan Club, Ningen Tankyū, Amatoria) and a second generation that emerged under official suppression after Fūzoku Zōshi, including the founding of Uramado.
The later parts turn from the magazines to their writers. Kawahara reads four contributors, among them Azuma Shin and Numa Shōzō, through their fiction and confessional pieces, including Numa’s Kachikujin Yapū, to show how readers of the period thought about domination, violence, consent, love and autonomy. Two appendices identify the people behind the pen names Azuma Shin and Numa Shōzō.