Fūzoku Sōshi was a short-lived but influential Japanese magazine devoted to erotic customs, sadomasochism, bondage, fetishism, and other forms of sexual nonconformity. Published in the early 1950s, it combined fiction, essays, illustrations, photographs, reader letters, and personal testimony, creating a space where writers, artists, and readers could explore desires largely excluded from respectable postwar culture.
Compared with more cautious contemporary publications, Fūzoku Sōshi often adopted a more provocative and experimental tone. Its pages reveal not only the development of early postwar SM imagery and vocabulary, but also the formation of a dispersed erotic community connected through correspondence, shared fantasies, and debate. Although the magazine lasted only seventeen issues, it offers a rare record of how Japanese SM culture was being imagined, discussed, and organized before the emergence of later specialist magazines.
