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Fuzoku Kitan · April 1960: Special Issue on the Psychology and Reality of Whipping

Summary

The April 1960 issue of Fūzoku Kitan is organized as a broad “pleasure in cruelty” special issue, with a particularly sustained thematic concentration on whipping, corporal punishment, bondage, and the psychological relationship between pain and erotic desire. Its opening sequence combines reproductions of historical Japanese and Western punishment imagery, a color illustration titled “Five-Colored Satan,” an illustrated portfolio by Oda Toshimi, and extensive photographic bondage layouts. These opening pages establish the magazine’s characteristic mixture of historical curiosity, visual sensationalism, quasi-ethnographic commentary, and staged erotic tableaux.

The principal editorial feature, “The Psychology and Reality of Whipping,” begins with Uemura Kyūzō’s discussion of whipping as sexual expression, exhibitionism, domination, and fetishistic fixation. It is followed by Yamashita Seiichi’s historical survey, which ranges across religious penitence, ritual punishment, fertility customs, judicial discipline, and European flagellant traditions. Nishitō Isuke’s “The Tattoo of the Whipped Devil” and Masaki Shin’ichi’s reader-selected confession “Love Born from Whipping” move from analytical treatment into fictionalized or testimonial narratives in which punishment becomes a mechanism for erotic awakening and emotional attachment. Negishi Kō’s “The Ecstatic Death of the Burning Poker” extends the special issue into a grim historical case study of pain, masochism, mutilation, and fatal obsession.

The middle portion broadens into supernatural, historical, and sensational fiction. It includes “Night Succubus,” an illustrated gallery of erotic art, “The Woman of the Burning Stake,” “Intercourse Between Human and Snake,” “The Hellish Nunnery,” and accounts involving pistols, aristocratic women, restrained women, and the figure of Fanny Hill. These pieces alternate between narrative fiction, translated or adapted material, historical anecdote, and interpretive commentary. Recurring subjects include convent fantasy, occult seduction, punishment chambers, coercion, female dominance, clandestine couples, and the transformation of fear or shame into erotic excitement.

The later issue contains shorter essays and confession-like features on body hair, sexual superstitions, Meiji-period curiosities, unusual methods of arousal, leather-strap pain, women treating men as servants, mass captivity, female wrestling, jeweled hair ornaments, fantasies of savagery, and necrophilic fixation. The closing pages continue the magazine’s mixture of pseudo-scientific speculation, historical miscellany, fiction, reader-oriented discussion, and promotional matter. Taken as a whole, the issue presents sadomasochism not as a single practice but as a cultural system linking ritual, punishment, visual art, confession, folklore, history, fantasy, and modern sexual identity.

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