Edit Issue Analysis

Specialty S&M · January 1981

Summary

Specially S&M No. 15, the January 1981 New Year issue, combines staged erotic photography, autobiographical fetish testimony, marital SM narratives, serialized fiction, practical bondage instruction, reader correspondence, and community-oriented back matter. Its opening color pages establish the magazine's visual vocabulary through bondage, humiliation, shaving, pregnancy imagery, suspension, and posed scenes of domination. Yamaguchi Tsubaki's illustrated Yōbaku Mōrō Ezu then shifts from photography to graphic fantasy before the issue's formal contents pages introduce the longer prose and photographic features that dominate the remainder of the magazine.

The main body begins with Tsutsumi Misao's My Half-Life of Diaper Obsession, a first-person account organized around a persistent diaper fetish and its relationship to the author's sexual development. Niwa Kenichirō's The Day I Punished Madame Keiko expands into a lengthy account of punishment, domination, equipment, and ideas about submission. Fujimoto Daisaku's Reiko in Training continues the training motif, while Matsuzaka Kazumasa's Sadistic Journey: My Life of Love and Torment with My Wife places increasingly elaborate SM activity within marriage. The Yuga Photo Gallery feature Young Wife's Honey Flame follows as a substantial monochrome photographic sequence, reinforcing the issue's movement between claimed personal experience and staged visual fantasy.

Later sections broaden the magazine's range. Sailor-costume bondage photographs and the reader-submitted Bound Female Prisoner feature precede Akima Tōko's serialized novel Momoko, Part Three. Shirakawa Sō's Practical Rope-Bondage Techniques, Part Two is one of the issue's most important technical features, using sequential photographs to demonstrate tachibishinawa and honnawa patterns while discussing placement, tightening, balance, bodily movement, and the practical behavior of rope. Continued: To My Master presents Miyoko's correspondence as an intimate submissive confession, while Ōsawa Rie's Traveler in the Forest of Bondage frames SM as a personal journey of discovery and experimentation.

The final third remains unusually rich rather than tapering into incidental back matter. Takizawa Fumiyoshi introduces his wife Tamiko in a reader-submitted marital memoir, and Tajima Yoshio's Awakening to Couples' Play describes the gradual incorporation of domination and restraint into married life. Shima Shikō's Tomoko Training Travel Record: The Flame-Bound Girl Who Burned in Naniwa follows a training trip to Osaka and describes specialized hotel rooms, equipment, bondage, and role-play. An unnumbered Yuga Salon submission form is followed by six pages of Reader Correspondence, where readers discuss photographs, techniques, preferences, and their own experience. Yuga Salon then provides another community exchange space with letters and submitted photographs. The closing Shūsei Saibun page functions as an editorial afterword, reflecting on the magazine, its readership, and the place of SM publishing while also carrying the issue's publication information.

Taken as a whole, the issue presents SM as a participatory subculture rather than merely a fantasy genre. Technique, fiction, domestic partnership, reader testimony, photography, correspondence, and editorial community-building continually overlap. Its mixture of instructional rope work, first-person confession, marital experimentation, and reader exchange makes it a particularly useful record of the social and editorial ecology of Japanese SM publishing at the beginning of the 1980s.

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