SM Sniper · SM Sniper No. 337, September 2007

Dirty Conversation: The Mad Age of Kinbaku: Yukimura Haruki, Women, Rope, and the Life of a Bakushi! Part Three

Author: Yukimura Haruki Printed pages: 245-249 PDF pages: 219 –223

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Yukimura Haruki: Women, Rope, and the Life of a Bakushi! Part Three

Speaker: Yukimura Haruki
Interviewer: Inoue 文 [given-name reading uncertain]

PDF viewer page 219 / printed page 245

Yukimura Haruki: Women, Rope, and the Life of a Bakushi! Part Three

As I became involved in adult work, I found myself being consumed by the
daily grind. As I struggled to make a living, the gap between what I was
doing for work and the way a maniac looks at these things kept widening.
Those days of conflict, and the twists and turns of a life.

PDF viewer page 220 / printed page 246

Following Momoe Yamaguchi's retirement, Pink Lady broke up. As the era of
Seiko Matsuda's overwhelming popularity began, a succession of sixteen- and
seventeen-year-old idol singers debuted, including Akina Nakamori, Kyoko
Koizumi, Yu Hayami, and Chiemi Hori, each aiming to become the "next Seiko."

The lolicon boom arrived as well. In the adult market, the readership first
cultivated by Shojo Alice from Alice Publishing expanded further, while
"lolicon magazines" such as Lemon People from Amatoria and Manga Burikko
from Self Publishing increased their sales.

At the same time, Nikkatsu Roman Porno had become established as
entertainment for adults. It was also serving as a kind of rehabilitation
mechanism for television personalities, casting former singer Lucia Santo
in Female Teacher: In Front of Her Students, for example. As its momentum
grew, the genre was also producing one talented director after another.

Yukimura Haruki was thirty-two. Because of circumstances involving his
family, he had left an advertising company and gone into the family
business, running himself ragged through Osaka's entertainment districts.

"Because I liked women."

Ten years passed. Once the family business had settled down, Yukimura picked
up his camera again and left home. He entered the adult-entertainment
industry, something he had been thinking about for some time, and steadily
accumulated experience.

"I don't really have many good memories of that period. I was desperate.
I made a living doing things like Shashin Jidai and working as a
sex-industry writer. I also did television production work. I worked as a
cameraman too, but that was ordinary erotic photography. The bondage
photographs I shot using my own models.

"There was a magazine called SM Spirits, remember? When they began
serializing my photographs, an editor just went ahead and gave me a name.
If he'd seen my face, there's no way he would have given me a neat, pretty
name like 'Yukimura Haruki.' Hahaha."

At the time, Yukimura says, questions about his own sexual inclinations were
less important than establishing himself professionally as a cameraman.

"I was impatient. I wanted to do the job properly. Eroticism isn't something
simple, you know."

Having entered this world through the enormous power of the mass media,
Yukimura sometimes found it painful when a job forced him into simplistic
ways of presenting things for aficionados.

"I wanted to make a name for myself as a professional. But while I kept
shooting as work, I started losing track of what I was actually doing.
I'd ask myself, 'How do you photograph something that's genuinely erotic?'

"But I couldn't do it at all. Just spreading a woman's legs and shooting a
close-up of her crotch doesn't automatically make it erotic.

"So while doing the work, I was also trying to make the kind of eroticism I
imagined into something concrete. But I could never quite make it tangible."

The stress caused him to develop a stomach ulcer, and he spent an entire
month in the hospital. By then the era name had changed to Heisei, and
Yukimura was thirty-nine.

Today the name "bakushi Yukimura Haruki" is well known, but it would still
be some time before tying itself became a viable profession. Even after
leaving the hospital, he continued through a period of anxiety and
frustration.

"I felt like there wasn't anywhere left for me to go. It was pretty
desperate. I was depressed, thinking, 'So what am I supposed to do now?'

"Then a friend from my television days, who was running an office for pink
films in Tokyo, went out of his way to contact me.

"There was work shooting AV for manufacturers. Whenever there was a
production, I'd go, traveling back and forth between Osaka and Tokyo.

"I had learned how to shoot through television, so I worked as the director.
I wanted to do SM if I could, but mostly it was ordinary AV. 'Put this in,
put that in.' Completely work."

Even so, regularly being entrusted with control of a production became an
important turning point. Among the companies commissioning work were
CineMagic and Taiyo Tosho. From this period onward, Yukimura gradually
established himself as an SM-video director.

"Back then I still wanted to be a still photographer. So while directing I
would also shoot the package photographs myself.

"Normally a director doesn't do that, right? A producer or somebody at the
manufacturer told me off and said I needed to concentrate on directing.

"Then I just kept getting busier and busier. Eventually I rented an
apartment in Ebisu and started living in Tokyo. That was right around the
time my SM-video work began increasing."

PDF viewer page 221 / printed page 247

From there, directing AV became the central focus of his professional work.

Among the SM works Yukimura directed during this period were:

- Rope Virgin Hunt, starring Miki Maeda, CineMagic, 1989
- Rope Flame: The World of Minomura Kou, featuring Ayano Serizawa and
  Ruka Mikami, CineMagic, 1989
- Bodycon Kidnapping Story: First Night, starring Riho Kobayashi,
  Taiyo Tosho, 1991
- Beautiful Captive Slave Girl: Metallic Slave, starring Kasumi Yuka
  [performer-name reading uncertain], Taiyo Tosho, 1991

Yukimura was particular about his work, and he says each production involved
its own difficulties. But among them, Rope Flame: The World of Minomura Kou
remained especially memorable.

It was an unusual documentary covering the final years of Minomura Kou,
known as the editor Suma Toshiyuki of the abnormal magazine Kitan Club, as
the artist Kita Reiko, and as the writer Minomura Kou.

"Until then I really hadn't had much interaction with other people who liked
SM.

"Through that production I met Nureki Chimuo. I met Oniroku Dan too, and I
met [name unclear in the source] as well.

"Getting to hear the voices of maniacs other than myself directly was
interesting.

"With reader submissions, the users, the maniacs, will say whatever they
like. 'Show it from six angles at once,' things like that.

"But when a manufacturer commissions you to make something, you can't
obsess over things to that extent.

"If I tie somebody, I'd want to leave her tied for thirty minutes before
taking the rope off. But when a manufacturer talks about a work that will
'sell,' you can't spend thirty minutes just doing that."

PDF viewer page 222 / printed page 248

"You can't do that. You have to move straight into the sex scene.

"That sort of frustration was there too. And in terms of pursuing what I
personally experience as eroticism, the people I met through that Minomura
project gave me a tremendous amount of stimulation."

Yukimura had already been strongly affected by the Kinbaku-bi Kenkyukai
video series produced by Nureki Chimuo through Fuji Kikaku. He felt that
the motivation behind those works was unmistakably different from things
made simply as commercial jobs.

At the same time, he was also conscious that if he were able to make SM
videos exactly as he wanted, their content would be completely different
from Nureki's.

"I'd been tying women as part of my relationships with them since I was in
my twenties. I'd learned rope that way and enjoyed it.

"There's something interesting about watching the person you're with,
seeing what she likes and where she likes it.

"So, in terms of feeling, my ideal was the image of genuinely falling in
love in the middle of the work.

"But because I was constantly being chased by the job, things became too
detached. My first reflection was that I wasn't achieving that.

"I had this sense of danger that if I reduced everything to nothing but the
mentality of doing a job, then maybe I wouldn't be able to continue in this
business.

"So I thought I needed to take the model more seriously. Even if it was only
for that one day, I needed to become more serious about her and put more
feeling into it."

"If I was going to shoot that way, then in my case it would probably become
something like serving the woman through rope. That was how I thought about
it."

In 1992 Yukimura established Sunset Color, his own production office devoted
primarily to SM video, in Ebisu, a neighborhood he had become familiar with
since moving to Tokyo.

He had decided to present his own particular conception of eroticism to the
world in the form of an original label.

Nearly twenty years had passed since the days when he had tied snack-bar
hostesses in Osaka's entertainment districts. It was a new beginning after
the age of forty-one.

"As for how I felt... I don't think I was having fun.

"I kept thinking, 'How am I supposed to shoot this?' That was all I thought
about.

"Instead of relying on sex scenes to carry the video, how could I make the
bondage itself interesting enough to hold the viewer?

"It felt like a challenge. I had absolutely no breathing room at all."

The first SM video produced by Sunset Color was Rope Service 1: Wet Reiko
Morimura [complete subtitle reading provisional].

At Yukimura's insistence, it was not shot in a studio. Instead, filming took
place in a corner of the office, an ordinary apartment room. The crew was
reduced to only about three people: an assistant director, a cameraman, and
Yukimura.

The intention was to create an intensely private atmosphere and capture
Morimura's unguarded responses. Reflecting the fashion of the period, her
costume was a bright-red bodycon outfit.

"You like this kind of bondage best, don't you?"

Morimura lowers her refined face and stiffens as the rope is placed around
her. The trembling of her dark eyes gives an almost painfully vivid
impression of her tension.

PDF viewer page 223 / printed page 249

The viewer's anticipation rises still further.

But once Morimura, with her demure features unchanged, is subjected to a
major gag, she suddenly displays an expression of erotic intoxication. She
slowly begins to move her body, almost as though she has been hypnotized.

"I'd shot this girl once before Rope Service, for CineMagic, and she'd made
an incredibly strong impression on me even then.

"I still remember it. It was a documentary-type project in which she was
supposed to experience SM for the first time.

"We took her to Alphain, an SM hotel in Tokyo.

"When she entered the room, there were all those implements and things
sitting there, right? She saw them and started crying.

"I thought, 'What a wonderful reaction.' My heart was pounding. There was
something about her that I could feel.

"She probably really did have masochistic tendencies.

"So when I filmed her again for Rope Service, both she and I had this
strange sense of suspense about what might happen."

Morimura is bound with her legs in an M-shaped position. The tip of the
riding crop in Yukimura's hand moves gently between her legs.

Her shapely breasts tighten as she exhales. When the suddenly reversing tip
of the crop brushes against a hardened nipple, her slender body jerks
violently upward and a sweet cry, almost like weeping, escapes her.

"If you're getting wet, that's proof, isn't it?"

As he says this, Yukimura teases Morimura through her panties. Though
embarrassed and made to feel humiliated, she cannot keep herself from moving
her full, pale hips in an obscene, coaxing motion. Her cheeks grow flushed.

"I was over forty then, right? She was only around twenty.

"I was conscious of that age difference, and I kept thinking: how do I tie
her, how do I torment her, so that, even if it's only for one day, we can
be in love?

"That was what I was thinking as I worked on her. I was completely absorbed.

"This really is a documentary of an actual romance, isn't it? And I'm the
protagonist.

"There's nothing more embarrassing than that, so you end up becoming more
and more desperate about it."

Morimura, panting and radiating intense sensuality, is pushed further. Her
already reddened, wet body is brought to the limits of defenselessness. She
is then rebound with her hands behind her, laid face down, and Yukimura
straddles her, continuing his heated attentions.

"At that moment, we're together. We're lovers.

"For me, even after the shooting ends, I want to make such a strong
impression on her that she carries it with her afterward.

"Whether the other person is completely concentrated on what's happening
or not makes all the difference. That's especially true with SM video.

"I take pride in that.

"I wanted the bondage I did to become more erotic than the bondage somebody
else did.

"In the early days I concentrated too much on shooting technique, and there
were times when I was physically there but not completely in it.

"But I put my feelings into the bondage. At that moment I'm giving it
everything I have.

"I'm competing in a place where I can't make excuses."

Only at the very end did they shoot several minutes of an intercourse scene.

Until then, Yukimura had attempted something he had previously wanted to do
but had been unable to accomplish: to carry the work all the way to its
conclusion using only the image of a woman experiencing sensation through
rope.

The result was a production overflowing with Yukimura's particular
aesthetic and determination.

Beginning with this commemorative first production, the Rope Service series
became one of Sunset Color's signature titles and was released regularly
thereafter.

"In the end, it's a question of how far I can reach her.

"Sometimes when I'm tying her, I'm there with the feeling that maybe I'm
actually going to stay right here and live with this woman.

"That's how I feel every time.

"Which means, conversely, that if I don't have myself together, things can
become very serious.

"I've learned plenty about what it means to become involved with a woman
whose masochism runs deep."

The voyage of Yukimura Haruki as a bakushi had only just begun.

The footer advertises Yukimura's live event "Y's Play Bondage," scheduled
for August 5, with admission listed as 10,000 yen for men and 5,000 yen for
women.

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Published: September 17, 2026 at 11:55 PM by KRP

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