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Kitan Club

July 1950

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Cover of Kitan Club, July 1950

Issue Details

Issue
32
PDF pages
98

Summary

The July 1950 issue of Kitan Club, identified in its publication information as the thirty-second collection, presents the magazine in an early postwar form that mixes sensational reportage, erotic and grotesque fiction, humorous miscellany, urban vice reporting, illustrated anecdotes, advice, reader-oriented curiosities, and sexually charged social observation. The cover announces a special collection of strange tales and curiosities, while the opening pages immediately establish the issue’s hybrid visual style through photographic street reportage, cartoon-like drawings, handwritten captions, and short comic or anecdotal items. A photographic feature follows a woman through entertainment and pleasure districts, while illustrated pages survey sexual customs, prostitution, illness, marriage, infidelity, and other subjects in a deliberately informal scrapbook-like format.

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A formal contents page introduces an unusually broad mixture of genres. Early fiction includes Suzuki Michi’s The Fallen Diseased Leaf and Tsukiya Shizushi’s God of Lust, followed by Satomi Teruharu’s Mermaid Manufacturing Den, a grotesque fantasy involving the artificial production of human-mermaid hybrids. Crime and urban reportage then become increasingly prominent. Kyōmachi Shinya’s Erotic Hell is framed as a true-crime narrative, while Tsuda Mikio’s The Truth About Temple Commerce: Osaka’s Back Streets Swirling with Money and Sex investigates the economics of urban vice, illicit businesses, housing schemes, finance, and sexual commerce. Humorous and satirical pieces interrupt these darker reports, including stories of theft, courtship, marriage agencies, and confidence schemes.

The middle of the issue moves between criminal anecdote, sexual sociology, and fiction. Murano Shōji’s Men and Women Pickpockets examines organized theft and the social organization of pickpocketing. Hinata Michio’s The Prostitute in the Cave relocates sexual commerce to a wartime setting, describing an encounter with a woman living amid battlefield conditions. The Strange Tale of the Man Who Drinks a Lady’s Urine turns toward fetishistic and pathological sexuality, while subsequent stories and essays examine obsessive desire, psychiatric treatment, religious belief, and interpersonal exploitation. The issue repeatedly treats sex as a point of intersection between crime, money, medicine, social marginality, and curiosity.

Later sections broaden the magazine’s scope through stories about older women and younger men, aristocratic or wealthy women pursuing inexperienced men, consanguineous marriage and hereditary anxiety, clandestine romance, nightlife, geisha and pleasure-quarter life, office romance, techniques of courtship, sexual jealousy, and eccentric urban characters. Several pages are organized as compact columns containing short anecdotes, puzzles, correspondence-style material, and humorous illustrations rather than conventional long-form articles. The final substantial sequence, Kuroe Ushio’s The Strange Women of Umeda, returns to reportage and fiction-like observation of women encountered in Osaka’s Umeda district, continuing the issue’s fascination with the erotic geography of the modern city.

As a whole, the issue shows an early Kitan Club identity that is broader than the bondage-centered magazine it would later become. Its central interests are strange sexuality, prostitution and nightlife, crime, unusual bodies and desires, marriage, fetishism, postwar urban life, and sensational human-interest reporting. Photography, caricature, pulp illustration, mock-documentary narration, and reader-facing miscellany all coexist, giving the publication the atmosphere of a popular postwar curiosity magazine in which eroticism is embedded within a larger world of crime, medicine, gossip, humor, and the bizarre.

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Table of Contents 25 items
  1. The Streets of the Flesh by Kita Reiko
    4–7
  2. A Collection of Japanese Erotic Tales by Sen'yūin Shunkō
    8–11
  3. Strange Talks and Curious News
    12–18
  4. The Fallen Diseased Leaf by Suzuki Michi
    20–25
  5. God of Lust by Tsukiya Shizushi
    26–31
  6. Mermaid Manufacturing Den by Satomi Teruharu
    32–36
  7. Erotic Hell by Kyōmachi Shinya
    37
  8. The Truth About Temple Commerce: Osaka's Back Streets Swirling with Money and Sex by Tsuda Mikio
    38–41
  9. Three Tales of Dramatic Medicine by Suyama Tōru
    42–43
  10. The Slothful Robber Appears by Arai Yata
    44–45
  11. A Discussion of Male and Female Pickpockets by Murano Shōji
    46–51
  12. The Prostitute in the Cave by Hinata Michio
    52–55
  13. The Strange Tale of the Man Who Drinks a Lady's Urine by Kida River Haruo
    56–59
  14. A Collection of Japanese Erotic Tales
    60–63
  15. The Noblewoman Who Toys with a Virgin by Kitagawa Haruo
    64–67
  16. Nighttime Street Slashing by Asaka Kōsaku
    68–69
  17. The Sorrow of Consanguineous Marriage
    68–71
  18. Office Romance
    72–73
  19. Rendezvous Kitan
    74–75
  20. Behind the Flower-and-Willow World: The Female Beggar of Gōri Shinchi by Oka Yasuko
    76–77
  21. We Are Shoe Shiners by Ayabe Yukio
    78–79
  22. Courtship Techniques by Tsugimura Shinzō
    80–82
  23. Secrets of an Affair
    83–87
  24. Love Spy: The Secret of the Sulfuric-Acid Affair by Hara Kōtarō
    88–90
  25. The Strange Women of Umeda by Kuroe Ushio
    92–98

Highlights

  • The opening visual feature uses photographs, hand-drawn commentary, maps, and street scenes to tour entertainment and pleasure districts, establishing the magazine's documentary yet playful treatment of the erotic city. (PDF pp. 3–6).
  • A sequence of illustrated miscellany pages combines sexual customs, prostitution, illness, marriage, infidelity, and popular humor in a scrapbook-like graphic format characteristic of the issue's early visual identity. (PDF pp. 7–17).
  • The Fallen Diseased Leaf by Suzuki Michi is a substantial early story centered on a troubled young woman, family conflict, illness, sexuality, and postwar social instability. (PDF pp. 19–24).
  • God of Lust by Tsukiya Shizushi uses a South Seas setting and encounters with local sexual customs to create an exoticized erotic adventure typical of postwar pulp fiction. (PDF pp. 25–30).
  • Mermaid Manufacturing Den by Satomi Teruharu is one of the issue's most overtly grotesque fantasies, involving a hidden establishment and the artificial creation of human-mermaid forms. (PDF pp. 31–35).
  • The Truth About Temple Commerce: Osaka's Back Streets Swirling with Money and Sex examines illicit finance, housing arrangements, commerce, and sexual exploitation in postwar Osaka. (PDF pp. 37–40).
  • Men and Women Pickpockets by Murano Shōji describes organized pickpocketing, criminal methods, gender roles within theft rings, and the economics of urban crime. (PDF pp. 45–50).
  • The Prostitute in the Cave by Hinata Michio places prostitution within a wartime environment, combining battlefield imagery, sexual desperation, and human-interest storytelling. (PDF pp. 51–54).
  • The Strange Tale of the Man Who Drinks a Lady's Urine treats fetishistic behavior through a mixture of sensational narrative, medical anxiety, religion, obsession, and attempted treatment. (PDF pp. 55–58).
  • The Strange Women of Umeda, near the end of the issue, returns to Osaka street life and presents unusual female figures encountered around Umeda as part of the magazine's recurring fascination with sexuality and the modern city. (PDF pp. 91–97).

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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