Tsujimura Takashi 辻村隆

Tsujimura Takashi was a Japanese writer and kinbakushi closely tied to the Osaka magazine Kitan Club. Nawapedia gives his birth as October 1921 in Sakai and his death in 1987, aged 66, and notes that accounts of his day jobs differ.

Kitan Club

According to Nawapedia, Tsujimura came across Kitan Club in 1948, after his discharge from the military, and began sending in work under another name. By about 1951 he was writing under the name Tsujimura Takashi, and after Suma Toshiyuki (Minomura Kō) left the magazine in 1953 he became its main rope tier. The historian Kawahara Azumi describes him as an early contributor who helped make the magazine’s bondage photo features and later carried it with the popular long-running series SM Camera Hunt. Nawapedia dates that series from November 1964 to March 1973; his column Salon Garakuki began a few months earlier, in May 1964, and ended in the same month. Nawapedia also records his Enmachō series in SM King until May 1974 and a short report in Kitan Club in August 1974, the last dated work it lists.

English Wikipedia names Tsujimura and Minomura Kō as the coiners of the word kinbaku, which it dates to Kitan Club’s issue of August 1952. Nawapedia’s page on the magazine likewise says the word first appears in that issue’s contents and photo pages, without naming who chose it.

Kawahara argues that any objective history of Kitan Club has to mention Tsujimura, and points out that the widely read memoirs of Iida Toyoichi (Nureki Chimuo) give him almost no space.

Television and film

Kawahara counts Tsujimura’s television appearances among the signs of the “SM boom” of the late 1960s, and notes that in the January 1970 issue of Kitan Club he described his appearance on the late-night program 11PM. Nawapedia records appearances on that program in 1968 and 1969. It also lists him as the bondage consultant for Ishii Teruo’s 1968 film on the history of female punishment in the Tokugawa era, and for a second Ishii film in 1969 in which he also acted.