Summary
The October 1960 issue of Fuzoku Kitan is organized as a special number devoted to sadism, masochism, erotic restraint, punishment, and what the magazine calls erotic curses. Its opening establishes a strongly visual identity: color and monochrome portfolios present women bound in kimono, yukata, underwear, or partial dress, alongside compositions involving blindfolds, suspension, patterned rope harnesses, furniture, and architectural supports. A foldout-style illustration titled “The Ring of Female Wisdom” and a formal contents spread frame these images within an editorial program combining staged kinbaku photography, sensational reportage, confessional writing, fiction, sexual folklore, and imported curiosities.
The issue’s central special feature, “A Gathering of Sadists,” begins with Nishio Toshimaru’s essay proposing a device for measuring sexual desire, then moves through accounts of cruel or criminal sadists. These include profiles of violent offenders, a purported confession by a sadistic yakuza, a necrophilia case, a first-person record of bondage, and a criminological discussion of sadism. The section repeatedly shifts between clinical language, criminal case history, voyeuristic sensationalism, and personal testimony. It is supplemented by “Now Is the Third Century of Thrills,” a pictorial survey of foreign magazines, horror films, theatrical spectacles, giants, monsters, wartime cruelty, imprisonment, and unusual erotic imagery.
The middle and later sections broaden the issue beyond the main sadism feature. The serialized novel “Revenge Demon” combines melodrama, punishment, confinement, and sexual danger. Historical and documentary articles examine sexual curiosities of the Meiji period, letters attributed to masochists, full-body tattooing, punishments inflicted on men, and a clandestine visit to the headquarters of the Japan Kōdō religious movement. “Torture by Hanging in a Basement” returns to a fictional or confessional underground setting, while “A Woman Burned Alive” uses extreme bodily peril as its central spectacle.
The closing portion includes guidance on erotic stimulation games, a reader salon, and the story “The Reckoning of Betrayal.” Reader material and editorial notices reinforce the publication’s identity as a participatory subculture rather than merely a fiction magazine. Across the issue, rope restraint is presented as visual art, erotic technique, criminal behavior, psychological symptom, and narrative device. The resulting editorial mixture is characteristic of late-1950s and early-1960s Japanese abnormal-culture magazines: documentary claims and medical vocabulary sit beside pulp fiction, imported imagery, staged photography, dark humor, and reader fantasy.
Highlights
The opening color portfolio presents a sequence of women restrained with rope and cloth in domestic Japanese interiors, using kimono, yukata, tatami, lanterns, and patterned screens to produce a specifically Japanese kinbaku visual language.
The formal illustrated contents spread combines article listings with Western-style fetish cartoons, visually announcing the issue’s mixture of Japanese bondage photography and imported sadomasochistic imagery.
“The Ring of Female Wisdom” is a color foldout-style illustration of two women bound together in an interlocking configuration, functioning as one of the issue’s most elaborate pictorial compositions.
The extended monochrome bondage portfolio moves through named poses such as the woman in white, stone-floor scenes, couch restraint, disordered yukata, tortoiseshell binding, transom suspension, and long-cushion restraint.
“Now Is the Third Century of Thrills” surveys monsters, giants, horror makeup, wartime brutality, foreign theater, imprisonment, and bizarre erotic objects, revealing the magazine’s dependence on international pulp and spectacle culture.
The special feature “A Gathering of Sadists” combines a quasi-scientific essay on measuring sexual desire with accounts of violent offenders, a sadistic yakuza confession, necrophilia, personal bondage testimony, and criminological commentary.
“Meiji Sexual Curiosities, Part 9” uses historical anecdotes and period material to connect contemporary abnormal-culture publishing with earlier Japanese sexual folklore and scandal.
The sequence on masochistic correspondence, full-body tattooing, punishments inflicted on men, and underground hanging torture presents bodily suffering as testimony, ethnography, and pulp narrative.
The clandestine report on the Japan Kōdō religious headquarters adds investigative and sectarian material to an issue otherwise dominated by sexology, crime, and fiction.
The issue closes with extreme-peril fiction, erotic game instructions, reader correspondence, and “The Reckoning of Betrayal,” sustaining its mix of practical fantasy, community participation, and melodrama through the final pages.