Kitan Club
January 1952
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Issue Details
- PDF pages
- 109
Summary
The January 1952 New Year issue of Kitan Club is a densely illustrated popular magazine combining sensational fiction, investigative reporting, film-industry exposé, erotic anecdote, social satire, crime narratives, reader-oriented miscellany, and extensive advertisements and publication notices. Its cover and opening color plates establish a tone of glamour, erotic curiosity, and transgression, while the early photographic portfolio celebrates the female body through outdoor nudity, studio posing, paired models, and compositions emphasizing legs, breasts, and physical intimacy.
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Table of Contents 22 items
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The Reality of the Film and Stage Actor-Training Institute
Summary
An investigative feature examines film and stage actor-training schools in Osaka, focusing on their recruitment advertisements, entrance fees, instruction, employment promises, and relationships with production companies. Through reported cases and undercover-style accounts, it portrays aspiring young performers—especially women—facing deceptive marketing, financial exploitation, inadequate training, and alleged sexual or personal coercion.
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The Mummy of the Bedchamber
Summary
A satirical erotic tale about Ōtsuki’s troubled marital and sexual relationships, involving wives, mistresses, deception, and comic domestic schemes that ultimately lead toward a contrived happy ending. The story uses bedroom intrigue and sexual anxieties to parody contemporary gender and marriage conventions.
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Candidates for the Salaryman Class
Summary
A comic social satire follows Kaneda, an aspiring company man who learns to exploit corporate entertainment, expense accounts, female acquaintances, and office connections in pursuit of advancement. His adventures depict the emerging salaryman culture through cabarets, restaurants, travel, workplace hierarchy, and questionable business practices.
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Around Nagatachō
Summary
A serialized political novel set around Nagatachō follows Diet members, ministers, and female secretaries through factional maneuvering, money politics, ambition, and sexual intrigue. Its successive episodes satirize the hidden relationships and corrupt dealings behind parliamentary public life.
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Bodies Embraced in a Love Suicide
Summary
This crime-romance fiction opens with the discovery of the bodies of a young woman and a student-like man in a quiet suburban woodland, apparently dead together in a love suicide. Police questioning and narrative retrospection reconstruct the couple’s turbulent relationship, jealousy, emotional desperation, and the circumstances leading to their deaths.
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Obscene Hanging-Chart Illustrations
Summary
An illustrated erotic narrative follows Yoshiko and the men around her through seduction, domestic intrigue, sexual encounters, and shifting power within a household. The accompanying hanging-chart-style drawings visualize the story’s erotic scenes and period sensibility.
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Memories of My Years as a Prostitute
Summary
A first-person memoir recounts the author’s years as a prostitute, describing clients, working routines, sexual negotiations, and the emotional and bodily experience of commercial sex. The piece also reflects on changing desire, livelihood, and memories of life in the sex trade.
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The Gambler
Summary
An erotic fiction sequence centered on gambling, wagers, and the shifting relationships between men and women. The narrative portrays sexual awakening, seduction, jealousy, betrayal, and manipulation in nightlife and other intimate urban settings.
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The Woman Who Haunts the Public Telephone
Summary
An erotic urban narrative involving a woman whose encounters are arranged or complicated through public telephones and secret communications. The story explores anonymity, sexual intrigue, deception, and shifting power between women and men.
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Torture
Summary
A dramatized account of abuse by Japan’s Special Higher Police, depicting interrogation, physical torture, intimidation, and sexual violence against detainees. The narrative emphasizes coerced confessions, institutional cruelty, and the lasting psychological effects of police brutality.
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Continuation of the Octopus Story
Summary
Continuation of a serialized erotic story in which jealousy, suspicion, and troubled relationships lead to scenes of coercive sexual domination and bondage. Dialogue and embedded anecdotes frame the characters’ fascination with restraint, violence, and unconventional sexual practices.
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Shiri-Shiri
Summary
An erotic comic-fiction narrative centered on Yuki and other characters whose encounters involve sexual teasing, voyeurism, exposure, and repeated fascination with the buttocks. The prose combines dialogue, escalating embarrassment, fetishistic humor, and illustrated slapstick episodes.
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Secret History of the Indian Court: Women of the Palace
Summary
An illustrated, sensationalized account of women associated with an Indian royal court, framed as a “secret history” and blending pseudo-historical exposition with stories of palace women, rulers, servants, marriage, childbirth, and sexual relations. The feature uses lavish erotic drawings and narrative episodes to explore harem life, court hierarchy, and sexual customs.
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The Erotic Night Sash
Summary
An Edo-period erotic melodrama follows the intertwined desires of Gonza, Oyuki, and others amid clandestine meetings, seduction, jealousy, and shifting sexual alliances. The story develops into a tale of marital betrayal and revenge, culminating in violence and the exposure of intimate misconduct.
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A Fine and an Attached Letter
Summary
A comic-erotic story centers on Kasai, an electrical-company inspector who discovers unauthorized use of electrical equipment in Chiyo’s household and threatens a fine. His investigation turns into flirtation and sexual bargaining, with the fine, letters, and household authority becoming instruments in their clandestine exchange.
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The Woman Who Showed Her Body
Summary
A sensationalized erotic case narrative recounts a woman’s encounters with men during travel and at a hot-spring inn, including deliberate body display, voyeuristic attention, and sexual experimentation. The account develops into an emotionally troubled story involving family pressures, disappearance or death, and the alleged truth behind a suicide note.
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The Woman Boatman of Yobuko Harbor
Summary
An eroticized harbor narrative centers on a young woman who works as a boatwoman at Yobuko Harbor, describing her maritime labor, interactions with visiting sailors and passengers, and the sexual relationships that develop around the harbor. The story combines working-woman identity and coastal community life with seduction, exploitation, and romantic conflict.
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Oroku of the Mountain People
Summary
A sensational fictional narrative about Oroku, a woman from a remote mountain community, whose relationships with men become entangled in betrayal, jealousy, pursuit, and violent confrontation. The story combines erotic melodrama with depictions of marginal rural life and outlaw-like mountain society.
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Fire Play at the Apartment for Working Women
Summary
A fictional drama set in an apartment housing kept women, where financial dependence, loneliness, and the women’s relationships with visiting men produce rivalry and emotional upheaval. Secret affairs and attempts to escape restrictive circumstances develop into a tense romantic entanglement involving the residents and their acquaintances.
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The Lustful General and the Serpent Actress
Summary
An erotic historical adventure in which a powerful general becomes entangled with a seductive actress whose beauty and provocative behavior disrupt military discipline and household order. The story combines sexual intrigue, manipulation, jealousy, and comic-satirical encounters among officers, performers, and servants.
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Terror in Hokkaidō
Summary
A political adventure serial imagining a violent foreign invasion of Hokkaidō, accompanied by maps, military speculation, espionage, and resistance planning. Fishermen, villagers, soldiers, and Communist organizers become involved in a tense struggle over coastal defenses, covert operations, resource shortages, and collective survival.
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Entertainment Columns, Reader Features, Puzzles, and Editorial Notices
Summary
A miscellaneous editorial section combining a candid advice column on sexual and marital concerns with entertainment features, humorous manga, shogi puzzles and problems, short-fiction and manuscript solicitations, reader correspondence, and publication notices. It also includes contributor and subscription information alongside practical guidance for readers and aspiring writers.
Highlights
- The opening color and monochrome portfolio combines erotic illustration, outdoor nudity, paired female models, and studio compositions emphasizing bodily form and intimacy. (PDF pp. 2–8).
- The formal New Year issue contents page uses a playing-card design and presents the magazine as a varied collection of investigations, fiction, satire, erotic anecdote, and illustrated entertainment. (PDF p. 11).
- The investigation of film and stage actor-training institutions documents misleading recruitment, financial exploitation, precarious employment, and sexual pressure directed at aspiring performers. (PDF pp. 13–23).
- “The Mummy of the Bedchamber” blends domestic melodrama, illness, jealousy, secrecy, and macabre bodily imagery. (PDF pp. 24–27).
- “Candidates for the Salaryman Class” satirizes corporate life through expense accounts, drinking, business travel, bribery, sexual opportunism, and office hierarchy. (PDF pp. 28–33).
- “Around Nagatachō” places erotic intrigue and political maneuvering within the world of Diet members, secretaries, committees, and postwar parliamentary life. (PDF pp. 34–38).
- The central punishment narrative combines bondage illustration with an extended account of restraint, humiliation, coercion, and bodily discipline. (PDF pp. 56–59).
- The Indian court narrative uses exotic costume, palace intrigue, sexuality, and dynastic secrecy to create a historical fantasy of imperial life. (PDF pp. 66–71).
- The late issue includes stories of exposed bodies, prostitution, port culture, mountain communities, apartments, hotels, and northern frontier danger, broadening the magazine’s social and geographical range. (PDF pp. 80–105).
- The closing pages combine entertainment columns, puzzles, advertisements, correspondence, submission guidelines, and editorial notices, emphasizing the magazine’s identity as a reader-participation publication. (PDF pp. 106–109).
Contributors
Named contributors represented in this issue:
- Aizan Hisashi
- Editorial Department
- Haruki Sanji
- Hokkai Hirozume
- Iguchi Masanori
- Kasagi Yoshio
- Kataya Kaoru
- Kawabata Mimio
- Kojima Shinji
- Masuda Shirō
- Matsutani Shigeru
- Midorikawa Takehiko
- Miho Shizuko
- Minato Saburō
- Nakazawa Kōhei
- Noto Ichizō
- Takahashi Yoshinobu
- Tanba Tarō
- Tsubaki Akihiko
- Yoshioka Gin子


