X

Gaho Fuzoku Kitan

October 1960

← Back to magazine archive

Cover of Gaho Fuzoku Kitan, October 1960

Issue Details

Issue
5
PDF pages
127

Summary

The fifth collection of Gaho Fuzoku Kitan is organized as a densely illustrated survey of bondage photography, punishment imagery, erotic art, translated libertine literature, historical melodrama, crime reportage, and sensational foreign narratives. Its opening color portfolio places restrained women against weathered stone, shadowed interiors, garden architecture, and an outdoor veranda. The formal contents spread then divides the issue into three major gravure groups, illustrated portfolios, literary adaptations, documentary pieces, and historical fiction.

Read full summary Close full summary

The first photographic sequence develops a visual vocabulary of quiet melancholy and constrained display. Models are posed on tatami, beside garden plants, at a bar counter, against a pillar, on a chair, and along a veranda. Rope is treated not only as restraint but as a compositional line that frames the torso, isolates limbs, and links the body to furniture or architecture. The second gravure becomes more elaborate and theatrical, introducing a cot-like platform, chains, trees, rocks, baskets, improvised wooden devices, and staged attacks. These images alternate between compact floor positions, upright restriction, backward arching, and deliberately unstable postures.

An illustrated interlude by Tagami Keiko and Ema Miku catalogues imagined torments involving steam, inverted hair suspension, wrist suspension, a pulley-driven device, and a woman threatened with rats. The third gravure returns to photography in modern interiors, notably a piano setting, tatami rooms, tiled bathing spaces, and dimly lit furniture. Its mood shifts from posed stillness toward implied interrogation and assault, with blindfolds, pressure devices, manual restraint, and exhausted aftermaths.

The middle section expands the magazine’s historical and international scope. An abnormal or grotesque secret-picture exhibition reproduces scenes of whipping, colonial punishment, public execution, torture, humiliation, and comic cruelty. A further gallery of women in riding dress and fetish costume is followed by Sasamura Hiroshi’s essay on cruelty created through tricks and stage illusion. The continuation of the Marquis de Sade’s The Prosperities of Vice supplies the issue’s principal literary treatment of libertinism and institutional cruelty.

The later prose section moves through massacre, urban and foreign danger, historical obsession, and crime spectacle. Articles describe mass killing, women in unusual or dangerous situations, arctic and desert ordeals, and a guillotine narrative illustrated by Ema Miku. A photographic crime feature presents staged murder scenes in outdoor and domestic locations. The issue closes with two illustrated period tales, “Love’s Obsession Becomes a Serpent” and “The Torment of Kichiya’s Mad Love,” whose ukiyo-e-inspired drawings connect erotic violence, jealousy, supernatural vengeance, and Edo-period theatricality. The final page functions as a pictorial coda, returning to the magazine’s recurring hierarchy of domination and submission.

Loading PDF…
Table of Contents 40 items
  1. A Melancholy Moment
    3
  2. Midday Is Quiet
    4
  3. White Fish at the Stand
    5
  4. Bound with Her Back to a Pillar
    6
  5. Chair-Top Cruelty
    9
  6. Receiving the Rope Marks
    10
  7. Hanging-Neck Doll
    15
  8. Pole Torment
    16
  9. Prepared Alive on a Tray
    17
  10. Chain Bondage
    20
  11. Melancholy Flower
    22
  12. A Cast-Aside Posture
    24
  13. An Unusual Wooden Horse
    26
  14. Rock Sliding
    28
  15. Cargo in a Basket
    30
  16. Attack of the Karasu-Tengu
    32
  17. Steam Torment by Tagami Keiko
    34
  18. Inverted Hair Suspension by Tagami Keiko
    35
  19. Wrist Suspension by Tagami Keiko
    36
  20. Flower-Wheel Torment Device by Ema Miku
    37
  21. Eat the Rats by Ema Miku
    38
  22. Rear-Hand Suspension by Tagami Keiko
    39
  23. A Scene with a Piano
    40
  24. A Delicate Mystery of the Female Body
    45
  25. Inverted Shrimp Suspension
    49
  26. A Pose Awaiting Cruelty
    51
  27. A Delicate Mystery of the Female Body
    54
  28. Cold Tile
    57
  29. Abnormal Secret-Picture Exhibition
    58–73
  30. Cruelty Created Through Tricks by Sasamura Hiroshi
    83–85
  31. The Prosperities of Vice, Continued by Marquis de Sade
    86–91
  32. The Massacre of Five Hundred Thousand by Isobe Otohiko
    92–93
  33. Women of Strange Customs
    99–101
  34. Love's Obsession Becomes a Serpent by Oda Toshimi
    104–107
  35. Human Steak
    108–109
  36. Journey Through the Desert of Death
    110–111
  37. The Ice Field Crazed by Lust
    112–113
  38. The Beauty on the Guillotine by Shigeyama Norio
    115–119
  39. Gruesome Murder Scenes That Make One Cover the Eyes
    120–123
  40. The Torment of Kichiya's Mad Love by Oda Toshimi
    124–129

Highlights

  • The color frontispieces juxtapose bound women with stone walls, shadowed rooms, garden architecture, and veranda scenery, establishing a restrained yet theatrical visual mood. (PDF pp. 3–6).
  • The formal contents spread organizes the issue into three gravure groups, illustrated punishment portfolios, translated literature, reportage, and historical fiction. (PDF p. 8).
  • The first gravure presents garden, bar, chair, pillar, and veranda bondage as a sequence of psychological tableaux centered on isolation and bodily display. (PDF pp. 9–25).
  • The second gravure introduces cot restraint, chains, basket confinement, trees, rocks, and improvised wooden devices, creating the issue's most varied photographic catalogue of apparatus. (PDF pp. 26–41).
  • Tagami Keiko and Ema Miku contribute a sequence of punishment illustrations involving steam, inverted suspension, wrist suspension, pulley restraint, and rats. (PDF pp. 42–47).
  • The third gravure moves through piano, tatami, and tiled-bath settings, combining elegant posing with blindfolding, pressure, interrogation, and staged exhaustion. (PDF pp. 48–63).
  • The abnormal secret-picture exhibition surveys whipping, public punishment, colonial violence, execution, humiliation, and grotesque comic imagery from international sources. (PDF pp. 64–79).
  • Sasamura Hiroshi's illustrated essay examines how stage tricks, suspension effects, theatrical lighting, and performance can create an impression of cruelty. (PDF pp. 80–82).
  • The continuation of The Prosperities of Vice provides a sustained literary treatment of libertinism and institutionalized cruelty. (PDF pp. 83–88).
  • The closing third ranges from massacre and foreign peril to staged murder reportage and richly illustrated Edo-period tales of jealousy, obsession, and supernatural revenge. (PDF pp. 89–127).

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.
X

EVEN MORE NEWS

POPULAR CATEGORY

©