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Kitan Club

October 1950

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Cover of Kitan Club, October 1950

Issue Details

PDF pages
107

Summary

The October 1950 issue of Kitan Club is explicitly presented as a special issue on fascination and the bizarre, and it displays the magazine’s early postwar identity as a wide-ranging erotic-curiosity publication rather than a narrowly specialized bondage magazine. Its opening visual material combines staged and appropriated photographs, drawings, handwritten captions, nudity, sexual humor, and voyeuristic scenarios. A photographic feature on Hadaka-mairi follows nude female worshippers, while subsequent illustrated miscellany treats perversion, erotic customs, nudism, sexual anecdotes, dream interpretation, marriage, and strange behavior in the magazine’s characteristic mixture of sensationalism and comic informality.

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A formal contents page on PDF page 19 introduces a dense main section of fiction, reportage, true-crime material, humorous narratives, erotic essays, and illustrated curiosities. The opening feature, The Female Students’ Private Punishment, depicts coercive punishment among female students and is one of the issue’s most visually striking pieces. It is followed by The Vagabond’s Love, which moves through the nocturnal entertainment district from evening into morning. Other early features include Five Women on an Autumn Evening and the Korean stowaway story The Captured Illegal Entrant. The third installment of Guide to Amorous Affairs then shifts the tone toward illustrated sexual instruction and anecdote.

The central portion of the issue repeatedly links sexuality with money, deception, crime, and social marginality. The Value of Five Hundred Yen and Temptation in a Hundred Forms examine sexual bargaining and predatory behavior, while a masked-author feature claims to expose the realities of fashionable writers. False Policemen on the Rampage and the regional tale Wedding Ceremony and the Stone Jizō bring crime and folk curiosity into the same editorial field. The Runaway Wives and Opening a Badger Game continue the issue’s interest in unstable marriages, sexual fraud, and urban confidence schemes. The latter uses the traditional tsutsumotase or honey-trap motif as a framework for discussing prostitution, deception, and male vulnerability.

The later pages become still more heterogeneous. An attempted lovers’ suicide confession is followed by stories of sexuality in Yokohama, a strange account of a woman working in a laborers’ camp, a police-station narrative framed as the statement of a suspicious man, and The Naked Dancer Arabesque, which treats the commercial display of the nude body. An adaptation from The Pillow Book humorously considers the morning after sleeping with a woman, while The Bathhouse Girl Peeks into the Men’s Bath turns voyeurism into comic reportage. Female Knight-Errant on the Road places erotic adventure within a stylized historical setting. A collection of sexual curiosities near the end surveys foreign and domestic sexual practices, fetishistic behavior, and unusual relationships.

The closing substantial feature, The Angel’s Crime, follows a young woman through a criminal case involving sex, violence, investigation, medical evidence, and courtroom procedure. It is followed by a historical piece on Townsend Harris and Okichi, linking the issue’s erotic curiosity to the mythology of Japan’s opening to the West. The final page contains reader-club information, a call for manuscripts, editorial commentary, publication information, and reader correspondence. Across the issue, sexuality is continually presented through overlapping registers of crime, medicine, gossip, humor, exoticism, urban reportage, and visual spectacle, making this an especially clear example of Kitan Club’s broad curiosity-magazine character in 1950.

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Table of Contents 24 items
  1. The Female Students' Private Punishment: Female Students Who Toy with the Body by Kataya Kaoru
    20–25
  2. The Vagabond's Love: From Eight at Night to Nine in the Morning in the City's Entertainment District by Akano Yumihiko
    26–31
  3. Five Women on an Autumn Evening by Miyanishi Hisao
    32–36
  4. The Captured Illegal Entrant by Kaidō Sanjirō
    37
  5. Guide to Amorous Affairs, Part Three by Tsukiya Shizushi
    38–45
  6. The Value of Five Hundred Yen by Hoshi Yumeji
    46–47
  7. Temptation in a Hundred Forms: Men Who Prey on Young Women's Bodies by Tsumura Shinzō
    48–51
  8. These Things Happen Too: A Woman Who Wagered Her Body
    48
  9. What Exposes the Reality of Popular Writers by Masked Writer
    52–53
  10. False Policemen on the Rampage by Nagami Ryūji
    54–57
  11. Regional Strange Tale: Wedding Ceremony and the Stone Jizō by Hanamoto Shirō
    58–61
  12. Erotic Department Store: Dangerous Pictures and Shunga
    62–65
  13. Modern Tales of Erotic Monsters: Opening a Badger Game by Kasagi Yoshio
    66–73
  14. The Fruit of an Illicit Love: Confession of an Attempted Lovers' Suicide by Mibe Mamoru
    74–75
  15. Honmoku: A Woman's Guide to the Ways of Love by Fujiwara Mitsuo
    76
  16. Strange True Story: The Woman Who Cooked at a Laborers' Camp by Itō Akimitsu
    78–79
  17. Statement of a Suspicious Man at the Police Station on an Autumn Night by Konohana Daisuke
    80–83
  18. The Naked Dancer Arabesque by Tomino Hajime
    84
  19. The Pillow Book: The Morning After Sleeping with a Woman by Sei Shōnagon
    85
  20. The Bathhouse Girl Peeks into the Men's Bath by Nishihara Tsuyako
    86–87
  21. Female Knight-Errant on the Road by Ryokumō Hiko
    88–93
  22. Collection of Sexual Perversions by Akashi Sanpei
    96–97
  23. Aozora Haruko's Exploit: The Angel's Crime by Sugiyama Kiyoshi
    98–103
  24. Secret History of Japan's Opening: Consul Harris and Okichi by Umikawa Eiji
    104–106

Highlights

  • The opening visual sequence combines photographic nudity, eroticized religious or folk imagery, and hand-drawn commentary, establishing the issue's fascination with the border between documentary curiosity and sexual spectacle. (PDF pp. 3–10).
  • The Female Students' Private Punishment presents coercive punishment among female students and is accompanied by a prominent illustration of a restrained woman surrounded by other students. (PDF pp. 20–25).
  • The Vagabond's Love traces a sexually charged encounter through an urban pleasure district from evening into the following morning, combining postwar street life with erotic melodrama. (PDF pp. 26–31).
  • The Captured Illegal Entrant recounts a Korean stowaway or clandestine entrant caught in Japan, embedding erotic and romantic material within the immediate postwar context of migration and border control. (PDF p. 37).
  • Opening a Badger Game examines a sexual confidence scheme in which erotic attraction becomes a mechanism for extortion, linking sexuality directly to the issue's recurring concern with deception and money. (PDF pp. 66–73).
  • The Strange Tale of the Woman Who Cooked at a Laborers' Camp uses the setting of a construction work camp to combine rumor, sexuality, violence, and sensational reportage. (PDF pp. 78–79).
  • The Naked Dancer Arabesque describes commercial nude performance and spectatorship, making the erotic body itself the subject of both entertainment and social observation. (PDF p. 84).
  • The Bathhouse Girl Peeks into the Men's Bath reverses the periodical's more usual male voyeuristic gaze and treats observation of male bathers as comic erotic spectacle. (PDF pp. 86–87).
  • Female Knight-Errant on the Road uses historical costume, sexual adventure, and violence in a stylized illustrated tale, including scenes of physical restraint and assault. (PDF pp. 88–93).
  • The Angel's Crime is a lengthy late-issue crime narrative involving a young woman, violent death, police investigation, forensic and medical evidence, prosecution, and courtroom proceedings. (PDF pp. 98–103).

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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