July 1953

The July 1953 issue of Fūzoku Sōshi shows the magazine operating as a broad laboratory of postwar erotic culture. Bondage and seme sit beside sexology, crime, confession, fetishism, homosexuality, prostitution, medicalized “perversion,” reader correspondence, and illustrated fiction. Rather than presenting SM as a self-contained practice, the issue builds a dense network in which restraint, cruelty, bodily response, spectatorship, and abnormal desire repeatedly overlap. The issue is visually ambitious from its opening pages. A “Fūzoku Art Museum” reproduces European scenes of coercion, abduction, resistance, voyeurism, and female self-regard, placing Western art within the magazine’s own erotic taxonomy. This is followed by Japanese bondage illustrations that organize restraint as a series of pictorial situations: a woman tormented by a lover, two women captured by a swordsman, a woman bound to a pillar, and a drunken female figure imagined through the lens of humiliation. The opening sequence makes the magazine’s method clear: imported art, historical fantasy, modern pathology, and Japanese seme imagery are made to speak the same visual language. A major feature of the issue is the recurring heading “The Pathology of Modern Customs,” under which the magazine surveys dangerous theater, male cafés, masturbation, office-girl sexuality, childlessness, prostitution, sexual crime, and other supposedly modern disorders. These articles mix reportage, anecdote, moral anxiety, humor, and quasi-scientific explanation. Their importance lies not in their reliability as social science, but in showing how the magazine created a conceptual neighborhood where bondage, fetishism, homosexuality, crime, and modern urban life could be read as related forms of sexual difference. For historians of kinbaku, the issue is especially important because it includes a substantial discussion of “New Torment and Old Torment,” illustrated with photographs of bound women. The feature compares older methods and newer forms of seme, treating restraint as something that can be historicized, classified, debated, and aesthetically evaluated. This is one of the clearest signs that bondage was becoming not merely an image or plot device, but an explicit field of knowledge. The issue also contains several features that turn female suffering into first-person or confessional narrative, including “A Woman’s Confession of the Room of Ecstatic Cruelty,” “The Woman I Tormented,” and a marital confession titled “One Hundred Scenes of Marriage.” These texts repeatedly blur the line between testimony and fantasy. They present bodily response as evidence, offer purportedly feminine viewpoints, and invite readers to interpret coercion through the possibility of pleasure. At the same time, the magazine constructs multiple erotic publics. Lesbos Correspondence gives women interested in women a mediated space to write, while Sodomia Correspondence addresses male same-sex readers. Other features describe meeting women at marriage consultation offices, urban nightlife, and anonymous sexual encounters. The issue therefore does more than display unusual desires. It organizes readers into recognizable communities and positions. Overall, the July 1953 issue captures Fūzoku Sōshi at a pivotal moment. It is still a general “customs” magazine, but its pages increasingly treat seme, bondage, cruelty, fetishism, and erotic abnormality as coherent subjects with their own language, imagery, history, and readership. The magazine does not simply report an existing SM world. It is actively assembling one.

Title	Author	Printed Pages	PDF Pages
Fūzoku Art Museum	Uncredited	3–7	3 –7
Three States of a Woman Being Tormented	Kita Reiko	8–10	8 –10
Torture in the Women’s Prison at Kodenmachō	Fukada Tetsu	15–22	15 –22
The Allure of Dangerous Play	Yanome Gen’ichi	23–26	23 –26
Male-Love Café	Kabiya Kazuhiko	27–31	27 –31
New Torments, Old Torments	Ueda Seishirō	32–36	32 –36
No Virgins in Tokyo!	Hinatsu Yukio	37–41	37 –41
The Room of Ecstatic Cruelty	Kita Reiko	42–46	42 –46
Western Clothes, Automobiles, and the Rendezvous House	Shibata Toshio	47–51	47 –51
Married Women Who Have Abortions	Nishijima Minoru	52–54	52 –54
The Swan of Ecstasy	Toba Eiko	55–64	55 –64
Women of the Secret Vice District	Onogi Osamu	65–68	65 –68
The Woman I Tortured	Nezu Meiji	69–74	69 –74
A Hundred Scenes of Married Women	Kijima Kōji	75–79	75 –79
The Chair of Needles	Furushō Hideo	80	80
The City of Beautiful Youths	Shima Yukio	81–88	81 –88
Ten Forms of Edo Punishment	Uncredited	89–90	89 –90
Women I Met at a Marriage Bureau	Kuromaru Keiji	91–96	91 –96
The House of the Whip	Sugawa Natsue	97–102	97 –102
Conversations on Erotic Implements	Nakano Eizō	103–105	103 –105
The Pleasure of Peeping	Mogami Kyōko	107–111	107 –111
Pathological Tendencies in Postwar Sex Crimes	Ashio Kyōzō	112–116	112 –116
The Lament of an Urning	Mashita Kōji	117–120	117 –120
Yasuna’s Madness	Arima Chizuko	121–123	121 –123
The Wife Who Fled	Kagawa Senjirō	124–127	124 –127
Lesbos Correspondence	Sonomura Keiko	128–130	128 –130
Sodomia Correspondence	Fujii Akira	131–135	131 –135
Fantasy Murder	Hiki Kyōichirō	136–146	136 –146
Recollections of Splendid Cruelty	Shindō Eriko	147–149	147 –149
A Sadist’s Wandering Record	Amano Tetsuji	150	150

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