Edit Issue Analysis

Sun & Moon · November 1977

Summary

Issue No. 5 of Sun &amp; Moon presents Japanese SM culture as a world increasingly organized around ordinary couples, amateur photographers, reader correspondence, private collections, and self-described practitioners. Unlike magazines built primarily around professional fiction or studio illustration, this issue repeatedly emphasizes material supplied by readers: photographs taken in bedrooms and tatami rooms, accounts of marital play, technical reflections on suspension, descriptions of personal erotic development, and appeals for compatible partners.
The opening photographic sequence, “I Am Miko,” establishes the issue’s domestic visual language. A woman is photographed kneeling, restrained on household furniture, blindfolded, and tied in several floor positions. The images are not arranged as a polished studio narrative. They resemble a private photographic record, with ordinary interiors and improvised supports remaining visible. This amateur quality is central to the magazine’s appeal. It promises access to SM as something practiced by people beyond professional models and commercial studios.
A second opening feature, “The Woman Who Came from the North Like a Wild Goose,” shows a mature woman moving from clothed portraiture into partial undress and rope restraint. The sequence presents transformation as gradual. The woman first appears as an ordinary visitor in a striped garment, then becomes the subject of private erotic photography. The metaphor of arrival from the north gives her an almost migratory identity: she enters the photographer’s world, is visually transformed, and becomes part of the magazine’s accumulating archive of amateur participants.
The issue’s major opening article, “A Challenge from a Married Couple Who Play,” is especially revealing. Written by Urado Hiroshi, it records the activities of a husband-and-wife pair whose scenes include restraint, leather straps, alcohol, rope, bodily exposure, and escalating physical stimulation. The article treats marital SM as both erotic practice and public challenge. The couple offers its experience as evidence that married life and SM need not be separate worlds.
The husband’s presence is often visible in the photographs through hands, feet, implements, or partial bodily framing. This creates a documentary structure in which the dominant partner is simultaneously participant, photographer, narrator, and curator. The wife’s body becomes the central visual evidence, while the husband supplies the explanatory voice.
The feature is historically important because it places negotiated domestic practice beside imagery that still relies on coercive theatrical language. The couple appears to participate willingly, but the photographs employ postures associated with punishment, helplessness, interrogation, and forced exposure. The issue therefore shows a recurring feature of 1970s SM media: consensual practitioners frequently borrowed the visual grammar of fictional nonconsent.
Sakuma Kazuyuki’s “Miscellaneous Thoughts on Sadism” moves from practice to reflection. The author describes sadistic interest through personal observation, fantasy, bodily response, and encounters with women. Rather than presenting sadism exclusively as pathology, he treats it as a persistent disposition requiring recognition and interpretation. The essay is not a systematic theory, but it demonstrates the magazine’s role as a place where readers attempted to name and explain their own desires.
Shima Shikō’s “The Woman Who Awakened My Sadistic Nature” uses autobiographical narration and staged photographs to describe erotic awakening. The author credits a particular woman with revealing or intensifying his desire to dominate. The images of kneeling, exposure, behind-the-back restraint, and seated submission give the autobiographical claim a visual counterpart. Desire is presented as something discovered through another body.
The continuation of “The Woman Who Came from the North Like a Wild Goose” extends the transformation begun in the front matter. The woman appears in more revealing positions and is treated increasingly as an erotic photographic subject. The sequence highlights the magazine’s fascination with the passage from ordinary social identity to private SM identity.
Ichinose Sōshi’s “Diary of Erotic Bondage” combines diary form, domestic photographs, and first-person reflection. The scenes unfold around furniture, television equipment, household floors, and narrow interiors. This visual ordinariness matters. Rope does not transport the participants into a fantasy castle or historical dungeon. It alters the meaning of the familiar room.
The photographic feature devoted to Sano Misako, a “substitute wife,” uses the language of marital replacement or role substitution. The title suggests that the photographed woman temporarily occupies the position of an intimate partner. The feature illustrates how magazines could turn pseudonymous women into portable fantasy identities available to the reader’s imagination.
“Record of Bondage and Erotic Torment,” supplied by Ichinose Sōshi, presents compact, physically demanding poses involving folded limbs, suspension points, spread restraint, and improvised frameworks. It functions less as narrative than as a catalogue of possible arrangements.
The second Hamura Shigeki Survey Album and Ōizumi Kazuya’s “The Bound Woman of Memory” further develop the issue’s archival character. The magazine presents images as personal records rescued from private collections. Memory, collection, and erotic spectatorship become intertwined.
Roppongi Kaoru’s bondage portfolio emphasizes the versatility of simple rope. The subject is curled, folded, and compressed in several positions. The portfolio is concise, but it contributes to a growing technical vocabulary of body arrangement.
Wada Eiji’s “Birth of a Slave Wife” appears first as a photographic feature and later as a longer submitted account. The repeated title is significant. It treats submission not as a fixed identity but as a process of production. A woman “becomes” a slave wife through instruction, exposure, restraint, repetition, and the husband’s interpretive authority.
The third installment of “M-Woman T Living in the West” continues the magazine’s interest in geographically dispersed participants. The feature suggests that an SM public could exist through photographs and printed testimony even when contributors lived far from the editorial center.
The reader-submitted photo collection makes the participatory structure explicit. The magazine is not merely showing professional content to passive consumers. It is gathering material from readers and returning it to a larger readership. Private photographs become collective evidence that others share similar practices.
The second portion of “I Am Miko” resumes the opening sequence. The visual echo creates continuity across the issue, as though the reader has returned to a familiar participant after moving through several other private archives.
“My SM Play Technique, Part Two: Inverted Suspension,” credited to Roman-ha Sei, is the issue’s most explicitly technical contribution. It describes inverted suspension through photographs and explanatory prose. The body is shown upside down in several arrangements, including leg suspension, vertical inversion, and assisted positioning. The article treats suspension as both technique and aesthetic composition.
The technical discussion is useful, but it belongs to a period before modern safety standards became widely articulated in Japanese-language instructional media. The text concentrates on posture, endurance, visual effect, and the practitioner’s experience more than on contemporary risk-management principles.
Mutsuki Fueichirō’s “Pseudo-Childbirth” examines a role-play scenario structured around simulated labor and delivery. The essay shows how SM fantasy could draw on bodily processes outside conventional punishment imagery. Pain, vulnerability, medical observation, bodily opening, and staged helplessness are reorganized into erotic theater.
Suzui Koreo’s “Miscellaneous Impressions of SMP” reflects on the terminology and practices grouped under SMP. The abbreviation appears to function as a category broad enough to include sadism, masochism, photography, and forms of erotic play. The essay records an unstable vocabulary still being negotiated by practitioners and readers.
Utsunomiya Esuo’s “Training a Female Member into an M-Woman” reports on activities associated with an SM club. The language of chōkyō and najun presents submission as something cultivated through repeated instruction. The article is also evidence of organized social activity beyond private couples. Clubs, publications, and circulating photographs were beginning to form overlapping networks.
Wada Eiji’s longer “Birth of a Slave Wife” develops the process hinted at in the earlier photo feature. The author recounts photographing and restraining a woman, interpreting her reactions, and gradually assigning her a submissive identity. As elsewhere in the issue, the dominant narrator claims authority to explain what the woman’s body and behavior mean. This makes the feature valuable evidence of period attitudes, but also requires caution: the narrator’s interpretation cannot be treated as transparent access to the woman’s consent or internal experience.
Oga Takashi’s “Confession: My Ideal Partner” turns from documenting an existing relationship to imagining a desired one. The author describes the qualities he seeks in a woman who could share his erotic interests. Such essays reveal how magazines served as rehearsal spaces for relationships that might not yet exist. The writer defines a compatible partner in print before finding her in life.
“Echoes from the City” gathers observations from the wider SM world. It discusses publications, advertisements, local activity, and the difficulties faced by enthusiasts seeking trustworthy contact. The magazine functions here as both observer and connective tissue.
The final pages contain several short pieces omitted from the printed contents list. “The Urge to Promote M-Infection,” “My Pornographic Library,” “Starving for the Real Thing,” “My Wife Is Indifferent,” and “Toward the World of M” offer compact reflections on collecting, dissatisfaction, fantasy, marital incompatibility, and the desire for lived experience. Together, they show the emotional underside of the issue’s exuberant photography. Not every reader has a participating partner. Some remain collectors, observers, or frustrated aspirants.
The Aurora column discusses another venue or publication within the emerging SM media network. The issue concludes with “Transformative Arousal,” a final reflection on unusual desire and the continuing search for recognition.
Seen as a whole, Issue No. 5 presents Sun &amp; Moon as a participatory medium. Its defining subject is not simply bondage. It is the conversion of private practice into shared print culture:

a couple turns its bedroom activity into a photographic challenge;
 	a husband narrates the transformation of his wife;
 	contributors send images from distant regions;
 	readers describe absent or indifferent partners;
 	collectors compare private archives;
 	technical writers translate experience into instruction;
 	the magazine arranges these fragments into a recognizable community.

The result is a culture built from circulation. Rope binds bodies inside the images, but the magazine binds otherwise isolated practitioners, photographers, spouses, collectors, and readers into a common field.

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