Minomura Kō 美濃村晃
Kyoto-born illustrator, editor, writer and rope tier (1920–1992), real name Suma Toshiyuki, who worked on Kitan Club and founded Uramado.
Minomura Kō is one of many pen names of Suma Toshiyuki, a Japanese illustrator, editor, writer and kinbakushi born in Kyoto in 1920. He signed much of his artwork as Kita Reiko. The Vanilla Gallery in Tokyo, which held a retrospective of his work in 2024, describes him as a painter, rope tier, writer and editor at once. He died in 1992; according to the gallery, a cerebral hemorrhage in his fifties had already forced him out of front-line work.
Japanese Wikipedia, whose sources include a history of postwar sexual culture by Shimokawa Kōshi, says Suma came from a family tied to a Kansai printing company and that he is said to have learned to draw bound figures from the picture books of Itō Seiu. The same article reports that in 1950 he began staging rope shows in Osaka’s Tobita district.
Kitan Club
Suma’s name is closely linked with the Osaka magazine Kitan Club. The scholar Kawahara Azumi dates his time at its publisher, Akebono Shobō, to October 1948 through June 1953, and notes that the cover of the October 1948 issue is already his work. English Wikipedia credits him and Tsujimura Takashi with first using the word kinbaku in the magazine’s August 1952 issue.
His friend Iida Toyoichi (Nureki Chimuo) long described Suma as the man who made Kitan Club. Kawahara argues that this view rests on little evidence: Suma spent less than five of the magazine’s 28 years there, and in Kawahara’s view the publisher-editor Yoshida Minoru deserves more of the credit.
Tokyo magazines
After leaving Osaka, Suma helped launch the rival magazine Fūzoku Zōshi in Tokyo in January 1954, according to Kawahara. In 1956 he founded Uramado at Kubo Shoten and served as its first editor-in-chief before handing the post to Iida. In 1969 Suma, Iida and the illustrator Muku Yōji left Kubo Shoten together; the next year they set up Abu Production, with Suma as president, and published the short-lived magazine Abumento.
Kawahara, citing the memoir of the editor Senda Hiroshi, records that Suma then tied the bondage photo shoots for SM Select before co-founding the rival SM Collector. The Vanilla Gallery lists illustrations and stories by him in SM Select, SM Collector, S&M Abu Hunter and SM Kitan. The website Shibari Dojo writes that he limited himself to five ropes and deliberately turned away from the elaborate suspensions that became popular in the later Shōwa era.