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Fuzoku Soshi · July 1954

Summary

The July 1954 inaugural issue of Gendai Tokuhon, issued as a special supplement to Fūzoku Sōshi, is a sprawling anthology of crime, punishment, erotic danger, abnormal psychology, urban vice, historical outlawry, cinema, and sensational reportage.  The opening half emphasizes American gangsters, police brutality, execution technology, sadistic institutions, forensic murder investigation, and international crime. The second half turns increasingly toward sexual customs, abnormal desire, gambling, prostitution, gendered confession, torture history, hypnosis, strangulation, and extended pulp fiction.
The issue’s cover presents a bloodied woman in a barren landscape populated by skeletons, masks, birds, and scattered bones. Its promise of “stimulation, excitement, and terror” establishes a world in which erotic display, physical danger, crime, and death occupy the same visual field. The woman is both victim and central spectacle, an arrangement repeated throughout the issue’s fiction and reportage.
The opening plate, “Black Cat and Woman,” places a miniature nude female figure beside an enormous black cat. The radical difference in scale makes the woman appear ornamental, fragile, and collectible. The following Western pulp-art pages reinforce this atmosphere through scenes of women dressing, fleeing, being watched, or threatened inside domestic and urban interiors.
The documentary feature on the latest electric chair transforms state execution into technological spectacle. Photographs, diagrams, restraints, chambers, and witnesses allow the reader to inspect the mechanics of death. A neighboring feature on American women’s exercise similarly presents the body as something shaped by machines, chambers, disciplined posture, and controlled movement.
The issue’s first long narrative cluster is dominated by American crime. “Street of the Great Torrent” creates an urban underworld of hotels, automobiles, guns, nightclubs, criminals, and endangered women. “A Bloody History of American Gangsters” follows with a quasi-historical account of Prohibition, bootlegging, organized crime, corruption, and murder. “Mask Theatre” then uses hidden identities, detectives, women in danger, and shifting allegiances to turn the modern city into a stage of deception.
The Japanese gang-war feature “The Blood Festival of Akiba” demonstrates that this violent grammar was not limited to imported American material. Rural landscapes, armed groups, ambushes, pursuit, and mutilated bodies allow domestic outlaw history to be organized according to the same pulp logic.
“The Ace of Spades” returns to an international criminal world of gambling, seductive women, coded signs, and betrayal. The playing card functions as an emblem of fatality, transforming coincidence and criminal intrigue into a recognizable visual brand.
One of the issue’s most revealing nonfiction features is “American Police Interrogation.” It describes beatings, electrical methods, deprivation, coercion, forced confession, and deaths in custody. The article is framed as an exposé, but its detailed inventory of methods also places state violence inside the magazine’s larger archive of bodily control.
“Japanese Master Thief Legends: Nippon Saemon” relocates the criminal hero into Edo-period history. Capture, questioning, imprisonment, and punishment provide a specifically Japanese counterpart to the American gangster material. “Rebel Dillinger” then gives John Dillinger the aura of a cinematic antihero through robberies, escapes, automobiles, disguises, and betrayal.
The central fiction “Sadism, Inc.” is perhaps the issue’s strongest link to the parent magazine’s erotic concerns. A woman enters a corporation whose recruitment, instruction, and hierarchy gradually expose her to exploitation and coercion. Cruelty is no longer embodied only by a lone villain. It becomes procedural, administrative, and institutional.
This bureaucratic model of sadism is historically important. Offices, interviews, supervisors, advancement, and company rules become technologies of domination. The story reflects a modern anxiety that violence can be normalized through routine systems rather than appearing only as spectacular criminal exception.
The forensic feature “The Mysterious Death of Kiriko Yamagiri” turns a woman’s corpse into a field of expert interpretation. Photographs and discussion of wounds, insects, blood, soil, footprints, and decomposition invite the reader to participate in a scientific gaze. The dead woman becomes simultaneously person, body, clue, photograph, and narrative object.
The feature “Secrets of the Dark Continent” uses colonial stereotypes to construct Africa as a world of danger, sensuality, alcohol, crime, and primitive mystery. Its racialized assumptions are troubling, but historically revealing. Foreignness repeatedly functions as a license for sensational representation.
The film feature “The Faces of Screen Villains” classifies actors who specialized in gangsters, killers, and threatening men. It demonstrates how cinema supplied recognizable faces and gestures for criminal masculinity. The magazine treats these performers almost as specimens in a visual taxonomy.
“Eight Hundred Years of Boxing Secrets” combines sporting history with blood, fixed contests, bodily injury, financial exploitation, and criminal influence. “The Hundred-Thousand-Dollar Finger” similarly turns technical skill and the body into commodities within a criminal plot.
The historical comedy “The Wandering Rogue”, the modern melodrama “Wounded Love,” and “A Perfumer’s Wandering Record” close the first major block of the issue. Together they show how fraud, itinerancy, sexual access, romance, and unstable identity can be treated as variations on a shared underworld.
The pages after PDF page 150 significantly alter the character of the issue. A photographic feature on women bathing during motion-picture production is followed by “Unexpected Criminals,” a detective essay about unlikely offenders and ingenious cases. The article shifts attention away from famous gangsters toward the ordinary person whose appearance conceals criminal capability.
“The Ecology of Gamblers” treats gambling as a social world with its own habits, language, psychology, and professional identities. Gambling is presented as both addiction and craft, and the gambler as a figure existing between respectable society and the criminal fringe.
The essay “A Male Abnormalist Reader: Four Forms of Play” belongs more directly to the tradition of Fūzoku Sōshi. It classifies unusual male sexual interests and discusses masochism, fetishism, staged humiliation, and related forms of desire. Its taxonomic structure converts private inclination into named and comparable types.
“My Debauchery Diary” is presented as a first-person account by a woman. Clothing, bodily display, exhibitionistic pleasure, and social transgression are narrated from within an apparently feminine voice. As with similar magazine confessions, the degree of factual or editorial construction cannot be determined, but the use of female testimony grants the material a special authority.
“The Woman’s Door” develops another female-centered narrative of desire, secrecy, domestic life, and sexual vulnerability. The ordinary room becomes a threshold between respectable identity and concealed erotic experience.
The film-history feature “Memorable Gangster Movies” builds an archive of actors, scenes, villains, and crime pictures. It demonstrates that the magazine’s criminal imagination was shaped not only by news and history but by accumulated cinematic memory.
“Light-Mania Miscellany” examines eccentric performance, unusual sexual spectacle, and comic or theatrical bodily practices. Its illustrations and anecdotes place abnormality between comedy, entertainment, and fetishized observation.
The article “The Strangler of Terror” returns the issue to criminal violence. Strangulation is treated as method, pathology, and sensational narrative device. The bodily intimacy of strangling distinguishes it from the distant violence of firearms and gives the crime a particularly charged place in the issue.
“Chattering Hell” uses anecdote and social observation to catalogue strange encounters, sexual opportunism, deception, and absurdity. It functions as a miscellany of urban vice, bringing together stories too brief or heterogeneous for the longer crime features.
“A Study of Western Torture Instruments” is among the back half’s most historically significant contributions. It discusses devices, restraint structures, institutional punishment, and historical methods of inflicting pain. The article presents torture as antiquarian and technological knowledge, but its placement within the issue also turns the implements into objects of fascinated inspection.
“Sodomia Correspondence Record” extends the magazine’s treatment of abnormality into male same-sex desire and correspondence. Although framed by period terminology, it records the existence of a readership interested in recognition, testimony, and contact rather than only voyeuristic description.
“The Weeping Enka Singer” follows itinerant performers through bars, entertainment districts, unstable employment, emotional manipulation, and sexual opportunity. Its world is one of small bands, taverns, roadside engagements, and lives lived outside secure domestic respectability.
The final long narrative, “The Laughing Murderer,” begins near PDF page 235 and continues through the end of the substantive issue. It combines murder, investigation, suspects, false appearances, and prolonged suspense. The final pages, including the closing notices on PDF page 248, confirm that this is not a 150-page supplement but a full-scale pulp anthology whose later half is essential to understanding its editorial range.
Seen in full, the issue moves through several overlapping worlds:

punishment as technology
 	crime as history and spectacle
 	the female body as victim, clue, commodity, and narrator
 	sadism as personal desire and institutional system
 	abnormality as psychological category and magazine identity
 	cinema as a reservoir of criminal gestures and personalities
 	correspondence and confession as evidence of hidden publics

For readers of Kinbaku Today, the issue is valuable not because rope dominates it, but because it reveals the larger visual and narrative ecosystem from which early Japanese SM culture drew. Electric chairs, interrogation rooms, offices, forensic laboratories, gambling dens, prisons, theaters, torture museums, bedrooms, and movie screens all become sites where bodies are controlled, inspected, interpreted, or transformed into spectacle.

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