Kitan Club was one of the most important magazines in the formation of postwar Japanese SM culture. Founded in the late 1940s, it began as a broad “curiosity” magazine combining erotic fiction, crime, medicine, humor, popular science, confession, social observation, and accounts of supposedly abnormal sexuality. Over the course of the early 1950s, however, bondage, sadism, masochism, fetishism, punishment imagery, and reader correspondence became increasingly central. The magazine did not simply document an existing SM community. Through recurring terminology, serialized fiction, illustrations, photographs, technical discussion, and letters from readers, it helped create the cultural field in which Japanese SM could become recognizable as a shared body of desires, practices, and ideas.
