Edit Issue Analysis

Sun & Moon · December 1977

Summary

The sixth issue of Sun &amp; Moon, published in December 1977, continues the magazine’s distinctive project of turning private SM practice into a participatory print culture. Its central subjects are amateur photography, domestic rope play, practical equipment design, marital relationships, personal confession, bodily fetishism, and the exchange of ideas among readers.
The issue is especially notable for the way it moves between three scales of SM practice. At the most intimate level, it documents individual couples and private models in ordinary rooms. At the technical level, it presents architectural plans, apparatus designs, suspension methods, and improvised tools. At the social level, it gathers essays and photographs from geographically dispersed readers, converting isolated experience into a shared archive.
The opening portfolio, “Special Photographs of Watanabe Yoshimi,” establishes the issue’s visual vocabulary. The model is suspended from ceiling beams, spread by several rope lines, tied upright to a pillar, and restrained on bedding. The domestic setting remains visible throughout. Sliding doors, exposed beams, household furniture, and bedding become the architecture of the scene.
The photographs emphasize the relationship between rope and the room. The body is not simply wrapped in isolation. It is attached to pillars, overhead supports, and floor-level anchors. The interior becomes a practical apparatus, demonstrating how amateur practitioners adapted ordinary Japanese housing to their erotic needs.
Urado Hiroshi’s accompanying “Photographic Record of Watanabe Yoshimi” gives the images a narrative frame. The essay describes encounters, photographic sessions, restraint, bodily reactions, and the circumstances under which the model became involved. As elsewhere in Sun &amp; Moon, the photographer or dominant partner also becomes the narrator who interprets the woman’s experience.
This combination of image and explanatory voice is historically valuable but ethically complicated. The model appears as an active participant in the photographic production, yet the reader receives her interior experience mainly through the man arranging, photographing, and describing her. The article therefore documents both reciprocal practice and the gendered authority through which that practice was represented.
Taga Kin’s “Design for an SM Playroom” is among the issue’s most important technical contributions. Across several pages, the article provides floor plans, elevations, diagrams, and imagined interior views of a purpose-built structure called Synagogue. The design includes suspension beams, movable pillars, platforms, ladders, doors, hooks, ropes, and specialized spaces for restraint.
The feature marks a shift from improvising with household architecture to designing architecture specifically for SM. Earlier articles often transform a pillar, bedroom, or tatami room into an erotic environment. Here the building itself is conceived from the outset as an apparatus.
The name Synagogue gives the proposed structure a quasi-ritual character. The playroom is not merely a workshop. It is imagined as a dedicated place of gathering, transformation, and erotic ceremony. The drawings turn fantasy into something approaching a construction proposal.
Urado Hiroshi’s “On Making SM Films” explores the practical difficulties of producing moving images. The article discusses cameras, performers, location, continuity, editing, lighting, staging, and the difference between still photography and film. Motion changes the demands of representation: a pose that works as a single photograph must become a sequence of actions.
The essay also reveals the growing importance of amateur film within the SM community. Readers were not merely collecting published photographs. Some were attempting to create and circulate their own moving-image records, borrowing techniques from commercial cinema while working with limited private resources.
The article uses scenes from Japanese erotic films to discuss composition and staging. Women are shown tied to horses, restrained outdoors, exposed to rain, and fixed to large wooden structures. These film stills expand the magazine’s visual environment beyond the bedroom and into landscape, historical spectacle, and cinematic fantasy.
Kawabe Seiya’s “Forms of Love” turns toward emotional interpretation. The essay asks how SM desire relates to affection, intimacy, jealousy, trust, and long-term relationships. Rather than treating sadism and masochism as purely technical acts, it considers the emotional bond that may sustain them.
This relational perspective is developed further in Ichinose Mayumi’s “The Pleasure of Serving as a Beast of Burden.” Presented as a bondage memoir, the feature combines photographs with a first-person account of service, restraint, bodily positioning, and submission to a husband or dominant partner.
The title’s language of service is important. The narrator does not describe bondage merely as something done to her. She presents submission as a role she takes pleasure in inhabiting. Even so, the essay’s published form remains mediated by the magazine, and its claims cannot automatically be treated as an unfiltered record of the woman’s experience.
The accompanying images show the subject curled on the floor, restrained at wrists and ankles, bound upright to a crossbeam, chained at the waist, and suspended upside down. The ordinary Japanese room becomes a changing stage through the use of rope, chains, beams, and furniture.
The photographic continuation of “The Woman Who Came from the North Like a Wild Goose” revisits a participant introduced in earlier issues. Her reappearance creates continuity across the magazine’s developing archive. Readers are encouraged to recognize individual women as recurring figures rather than anonymous bodies.
The Roman School Bondage Record documents another private session using rope, furniture, stockings, gags, and floor restraint. The feature’s presentation resembles a personal album rather than a polished commercial portfolio, reinforcing the magazine’s preference for amateur authenticity.
Ichinose Sōshi’s “Record of Bondage and Erotic Torment” offers a second compact photographic portfolio. The woman is shown restrained in a domestic room, exposed across tatami, and arranged in crouching and reclining positions. The emphasis is not on a single spectacular tie but on the accumulation of variations.
The reader-supplied feature “An M-Woman Is Better Plump” explicitly argues for the erotic value of a fuller-bodied submissive woman. The photographs emphasize body mass, softness, posture, chains, blindfolding, and restraint. The title challenges narrow ideals of feminine beauty and reveals the magazine’s interest in diverse body types.
“Pet Miko” continues the recurring photographic identity introduced in earlier issues. The woman is shown restrained on the floor and manipulated with simple wooden or pole-like implements. The use of the word “pet” turns the model into a continuing role or persona within the magazine’s internal world.
Tanigawa Kiyoshi’s photo report presents inverted suspension, bodily folding, and close-range stimulation. Its ordinary room, visible bookshelves, bedding, and household objects again emphasize the domestic production of SM imagery.
The photographic report “S’s Wife: A Record of Late-Night Outdoor Torment” moves outside the home. A woman is bound near a parked vehicle, tied to a tree, and restrained against architectural supports at night. The feature transforms roadsides, walls, automobiles, and trees into improvised play equipment.
Outdoor photography adds exposure, darkness, and public risk to the imagery. It also demonstrates the extent to which the magazine’s contributors sought new environments beyond the familiar tatami room.
Taga Kin’s “Yamagata-Style Pillar Frame” presents a purpose-built wooden apparatus through a detailed illustration and construction diagrams. The structure combines upright supports, wrist restraints, leg placement, and a central saddle-like element.
The article belongs to the magazine’s growing culture of do-it-yourself SM engineering. Readers are not simply shown finished equipment. They are invited to think through dimensions, materials, connections, load, and bodily positioning.
Roman-ha Sei’s “My SM Play Technique, Part Three: Variant Suspension” continues the practical instructional series. The article examines several suspension configurations, including supine, inverted, thigh-supported, and spread positions.
The technical attention is directed toward visual effect, posture, bodily pressure, and the sensation produced by unusual orientation. As with other period instruction, the article predates contemporary rope-safety standards and should be understood as historical documentation rather than modern guidance.
Mutsuki Fueichirō’s “Urethral Masturbation and Foreign-Object Insertion” shifts from rope to bodily fetish practice. The article adopts a quasi-medical and sexological tone, discussing anatomy, instruments, technique, and sensation.
This feature shows the breadth of the magazine’s concept of SM. Pain, control, bodily penetration, medical apparatus, and self-experimentation are treated as neighboring forms of abnormal or specialized pleasure.
Suzui Koreo’s “Sex-Slave Record, Part One” combines personal narrative, body description, photography, and fetish classification. The article attempts to explain a woman’s erotic qualities through measurements, bodily features, sexual history, and submissive potential.
The language reveals how the magazine often turned individuals into types. A woman could be classified as an M-woman, slave, pet, wife, or sexual subject through the narrator’s interpretation of her body and conduct.
The illustrated reference section on three types of instruments presents designs for specialized implements. Diagrams show needles, tubes, rubber components, and other devices. The technical presentation gives private experimentation the appearance of system and method.
Toda Shigeyuki’s “First Bondage Experience of a Sow-Type M-Woman” is one of the issue’s longest confessional accounts. The title uses deliberately degrading animal language, presenting the participant as a “sow” while also emphasizing her fuller body.
The article describes first encounters with rope, restraint against a pillar, bodily exposure, commands, anxiety, excitement, and the gradual discovery of a submissive identity. The accompanying photographs make the woman’s size and physical presence central to the narrative.
Shima Shikō’s “Fantasies Inspired by Beautiful Breasts” develops a highly specific bodily fetish. The essay considers the visual, tactile, symbolic, and erotic meanings of breasts, including rope compression, pressure, decoration, and manipulation.
The feature is followed by reproduced foreign photographs showing breast bondage, locking devices, bodily restraint, and fetishized medical or mechanical treatment. These imported images connect the author’s personal fantasy to a wider international visual culture.
The late pages contain several shorter articles and reader contributions. “Echoes from the City” discusses magazines, reader responses, private practice, and the search for compatible partners. “I Am a Witness to a Married Couple’s SM Play” presents an observer’s account of another couple’s activity, adding a third-party gaze to the usual husband-wife structure.
“Miscellaneous Thoughts on Valuable Photographs” reflects on collecting, authenticity, rarity, and the emotional power of images. The article demonstrates that SM photography had become not merely illustration but a collectible archive whose value depended on access, intimacy, and perceived genuineness.
“The Fourth Afterword” evaluates the magazine’s progress and future direction. Like the correspondence and editorial pages of earlier issues, it treats readers as collaborators in the magazine’s development.
The issue’s final pages include reader appeals, photographic submissions, group information, advertisements, and brief personal statements. The cover feature “Transformative Arousal” closes the scan by returning to the magazine’s recurring theme of erotic identity as transformation.
Seen in full, Issue No. 6 presents Sun &amp; Moon as an increasingly organized practical culture. Its defining movement is from improvised scene to designed system:

rooms become studios;
 	houses become play architecture;
 	pillars become specialized frames;
 	private acts become photographic records;
 	photographs become collectible evidence;
 	personal inclinations become named identities;
 	scattered readers become a network.

The issue’s most important contribution is therefore not any single photograph or technique. It is the construction of an infrastructure for SM desire, built from architecture, correspondence, equipment, media production, and repeated participation.

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