Japanese SM Magazine Archive

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.

Sun & Moon was a Japanese SM magazine combining bondage photography, erotic illustration, fiction, and fetish-oriented features. Its pages present kinbaku as both spectacle and narrative, placing the bound body within scenes of capture, punishment, submission, humiliation, and theatrical suffering. Rather than treating rope only as a technique, the magazine uses setting, costume, expression, and sequential imagery to create miniature dramas shaped by fantasy and emotional tension.

The magazine also reflects the increasingly visual character of Japanese SM publishing, in which carefully composed photographs and illustrated scenarios became central to the presentation of bondage. Sun & Moon offers a revealing glimpse into the aesthetics, recurring fantasies, and publishing conventions through which kinbaku and sadomasochistic culture were circulated among Japanese readers.

Yomikiri Romance was an early postwar Japanese popular magazine that gradually shifted from general erotic and romantic entertainment toward more specialized material involving bondage, cruelty, fetishism, and sadomasochistic fantasy. Although much of its content remained broadly erotic rather than exclusively SM, the magazine became an important transitional publication in the development of Japan’s postwar bondage press.

Itō Seiu was central to this transformation. The magazine published and promoted his historical research, drawings, staged photographs, and reconstructions of punishment and restraint, presenting him not merely as an illustrator but as an authority on the visual history of cruelty. In 1953 he supervised a photographic supplement devoted largely to kinbaku imagery, often identified as Graphic Depiction of Ecstasy in Pleasure and Pain. His work gave the magazine a distinctive connection to older Japanese punishment imagery while helping translate that imagery into the emerging language of modern erotic bondage.