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Kitan Club

February 1951

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Cover of Kitan Club, February 1951

Issue Details

Issue
27
PDF pages
110

Summary

The February 1951 issue of Kitan Club presents itself as a Collection of Rare Tales and Erotic Humor, combining nude photography, color erotic illustration, humorous anecdote, sensational reportage, detective stories, fiction, sexual folklore, and short comic features. The opening section is unusually important to the issue’s identity. After the cover and illustrated contents pages, several pages of nude photography lead into color pictorial title plates advertising major stories, followed by the multi-page photographic feature I Am a Peeping Glass. These visual pages establish the magazine’s erotic and voyeuristic tone before the numbered prose sequence begins.

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The first substantial prose section begins with short, conversational tales of rendezvous, marriage, artificial insemination, infidelity, and sexual curiosity. Sunday Pleasures, The Kawahara Couple’s Artificial Insemination, My Amorous Misunderstanding, Borrowing a Wife Without Permission, and the opening Stripper Story sequence create a mosaic of postwar sexual life in which medical novelty, urban entertainment, voyeurism, jealousy, and comic embarrassment repeatedly intersect. Ear-Cleaning Strange Tale then moves the issue toward a more explicitly sensational mode.

The middle of the magazine ranges widely across crime, erotic melodrama, and humorous observation. Detective True Story: The One-Eyed Murder Demon reconstructs a murder case in lurid magazine-reportage form. Early Spring: Two Love Stories and The Women of the Needle Shops present romantic and sexual entanglements, while shorter pieces and comic columns break up the longer narratives. The issue also includes the unusual reportage feature Following an Ultra-Postwar Young Lady, pieces about women carrying bedding, sexual encounters in entertainment districts, and a succession of erotic curiosities built around changing social customs.

Later sections return repeatedly to the contrast between older sexual morality and the perceived freedoms of postwar life. Then and Now Women, The History of a Prostitute’s Love, The Ghost of the Water Gate, Twilight Longing, and the concluding perverse fiction Love’s Caress Machine range from social observation to supernatural fiction and erotic melodrama. Short jokes, topical columns, reader-facing miscellany, and editorial matter remain interspersed throughout. The result is a deliberately heterogeneous popular magazine whose editorial identity depends on the friction between visual eroticism, comic confession, sensational crime, romantic fiction, voyeuristic curiosity, and fascination with the rapidly changing sexual mores of early postwar Japan.

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Table of Contents 38 items
  1. Nude Photographic Studies
    2–3
  2. Illustrated Table of Contents and Nude Study
    4–6
  3. Stripper Story: The Queen of Sex by Saotome Akira
    7
  4. Following an Ultra-Postwar Young Lady by Tsubaki Akihiko
    8
  5. Love's Caress Machine by Matsui Yoriko
    9
  6. I Am a Peeping Glass by Sone Saburo
    10–13
  7. Sunday Pleasures: Rendezvous Stories by Hanano Misako
    15
  8. The Kawahara Couple's Artificial Insemination by Nijiyama Mayune
    16
  9. My Amorous Misunderstanding by Negoro Yoshitaro
    18
  10. Borrowing a Wife Without Permission by Wakakusa Yumeko
    20
  11. Stripper Story: The Queen of Sex by Saotome Akira
    22
  12. A Woman Who Loves with Her Body and a Woman Who Loves with Her Heart by Ikariji Maya
    27
  13. Ear-Cleaning Strange Tale by Yoshioka Kakine
    28
  14. A Woman's Nature by Yamamoto Sakae
    32
  15. Detective True Story: The One-Eyed Murder Demon by Shiga Noboru
    36
  16. Early Spring: Two Love Stories by Shingetsu Genba
    40
  17. Then and Now Women by Hyogo Ippei
    46
  18. The Women of the Needle Shops by Suzuki Michi
    52
  19. A Kiss Worth One Hundred Thousand Yen by Kamiyama Tatsuo
    56
  20. Erotic Curiosity Short Feature by Midorikawa Hiko
    60
  21. Erotic Comic Anecdotes by Furyu Taro
    65
  22. Following an Ultra-Postwar Young Lady by Tsubaki Akihiko
    66
  23. The Maiden and Bestial Desire by Fujimoto Chieko
    70
  24. Curious Tale: The Dripping Bucket by Yumehiko
    73–74
  25. Curious Falsehoods by James Gon
    74
  26. The History of a Prostitute's Love by Kyogoku Eiko
    76
  27. The Woman Who Carries a Pillow and Blanket by Sumida Kikuo
    76
  28. Stripper Story: I Never Knew Such a Strong Woman Existed by Ozaki Bunpo
    80
  29. Kitan Wit Classroom by Shusabin
    84
  30. Kitan Gag Topics by Furyu Taro
    85
  31. The Ghost of the Water Gate by Sumimura Mitsuo
    86
  32. Twilight Longing by Aiyama Hisashi
    90
  33. Widow Comic: Devouring the Widow by Fumikawa Eiji
    93
  34. Erotic Spring-Rain Papers by Hara Kotaro
    94
  35. The Man Who Makes Women Straddle Him by Dohyo Shikohira
    100
  36. Love's Caress Machine by Matsui Yoriko
    104
  37. Dancing Bucket by Yumehiko
    110
  38. Reader Mail, Submission Notice, and Publication Information
    110

Highlights

  • The opening photographic and illustrated sequence combines nude studies, color erotic title plates, and a voyeuristic photographic feature, giving the issue a strongly visual erotic identity before the principal prose articles begin. (PDF pp. 2–13).
  • I Am a Peeping Glass uses staged nude photography and a stylized nocturnal city design to frame voyeurism as both comic entertainment and erotic spectacle. (PDF pp. 10–13).
  • The opening prose run treats rendezvous, artificial insemination, marital relations, and sexual misunderstanding as material for humorous and sensational postwar storytelling. (PDF pp. 14–20).
  • The Stripper Story sequence centers on a woman explicitly styled as the Queen of Sex, connecting striptease culture to the magazine's fascination with newly visible forms of urban erotic entertainment. (PDF pp. 21–26).
  • Ear-Cleaning Strange Tale begins with a young monk encountering a glamorous woman, turning an everyday bodily service into a sexually charged curiosity story. (PDF pp. 27–30).
  • Detective True Story: The One-Eyed Murder Demon presents a heavily illustrated murder case in the idiom of lurid crime reportage. (PDF pp. 35–38).
  • Early Spring: Two Love Stories combines romantic melodrama with explicit illustrations and reflections on youthful sexuality. (PDF pp. 39–43).
  • Then and Now Women explicitly contrasts older and contemporary women, using sexual and social behavior as evidence of changing postwar morality. (PDF pp. 45–48).
  • The Ghost of the Water Gate brings supernatural imagery and erotic danger together in a late-issue illustrated tale. (PDF pp. 85–88).
  • Love's Caress Machine, illustrated by Nomura Akira, is a substantial concluding perverse-fiction feature and one of the issue's most visually prominent late narratives. (PDF pp. 103–109).

Contributors

Named contributors represented in this issue:

Kinbaku Today is an independent online journal dedicated to the study, practice, and cultural history of Japanese rope bondage. Blending essays, translations, interviews, and archival research, it explores kinbaku not simply as technique, but as a living dialogue between history, performance, and human connection.
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