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Fuzoku Kitan · May 1961: Special Issue on Men and Women Possessed by the Whip

Summary

The May 1961 issue of Fuzoku Kitan is built around the special feature Men and Women Possessed by the Whip, using whipping as a point of intersection between sadism, masochism, punishment, sexual desire, fantasy, and popular visual culture. The issue opens with historical and humorous images of corporal punishment, followed by an extensive bondage gravure. Its staged photographs move between woodland and rural settings, tatami rooms, and domestic interiors, presenting women bound back-to-back, gagged, restrained in school-style clothing, tied among straw and timber, and posed in increasingly elaborate forms of rope restraint. A subsequent illustrated portfolio, Six Women in Torment, imagines ordeals involving heat, cold water, sharp devices, exposure, whipping, and other forms of punishment.

The principal textual feature begins with Ōtatsu Kinji's discussion of the widespread human fascination with whipping and continues with Okumura Sekio's The Fascination of Whipping. Abe Sadayoshi's The Whip Is Alive develops the symbolic and erotic significance of the whip through references to riding, sexuality, punishment, religion, and historical practice. First-person and quasi-confessional pieces then shift the feature toward individual erotic experience: Whip and Leather Strap for a Night, My Whipping Prey, and A Whip for the Buttocks of a Plump Young Woman describe attraction to corporal punishment as desire, ritual, and fetish. The feature also includes fictionalized and illustrated treatments of women trained or disciplined by the whip, as well as reproductions and descriptions of European implements associated with flagellation and sadomasochism.

Later material broadens the issue beyond the principal feature. The Nootrix section presents translated or adapted foreign bondage and discipline imagery, including Women's Equestrian Forced-Training School, with drawings of women restrained in apparatus and subjected to riding-themed discipline. The serial Cat-Torment Hell returns to Japanese illustrated erotic fiction. Two substantial closing serials, Aoyama Miekichi's Wandering in Pleasurable Torment: The Abused Woman and Ashidate Eikichi's Flame Emperor Temple: White Tiger Chapter, combine melodrama, cruelty, bondage, and sexualized danger.

Reader Salon occupies the closing literary-community portion of the issue, followed by notices about previous issues, books, photographs, agency merchandise, subscriptions, and contributions. The final editorial page solicits fiction, confessions, news, illustrations, photographs, and reader ideas. Taken as a whole, the issue demonstrates Fuzoku Kitan's distinctive combination of documentary rhetoric, erotic photography, translated Western material, sadomasochistic theory, confession, sensational fiction, and active reader participation.

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