---
title: "Kitan Club (奇譚クラブ)"
date: 2026-10-22
author: "Sr. Interior (流庵殿)"
intro_image: "https://shibari-dojo.online/images/bakushi/bak0005_sq.webp"
fulltext_image: "https://shibari-dojo.online/images/bakushi/bak0005_lg.webp"
categories:
  - name: "Key Figures"
    url: "https://shibari-dojo.online/bak-en.md"
tags:
  - name: "History"
    url: "https://shibari-dojo.online/tags/history.md"
---

# Kitan Club (奇譚クラブ)

![Kitan Club (奇譚クラブ)](https://shibari-dojo.online/images/bakushi/bak0005_lg.webp)

*Kitan Club* (奇譚クラブ) was published from 1946 or 1947 (year 21 or 22 of the *Showa* era) until 1975 as a cheap magazine printed on low-quality paper, one of the so-called *kasutori zasshi* (カストリ雑誌, pulp magazines). Over that time, and above all from the 1990s onward, it became an international reference point for Japanese sadomasochism (SM) and kinbaku (緊縛).

 ![Cover of the first issue of Kitan Club](https://shibari-dojo.online/images/bakushi/bak0005_01.webp) Cover of the first issue of Kitan Club.

 
> *Kasutori* (カストリ) was the name of the bootleg liquor sold on the postwar black market: cheap, of dubious quality and sometimes dangerous because of its methanol content. Applied to publications, it roughly means “fanzine.”

 *Kitan Club* (奇譚クラブ) means “Club of Odd Tales” or “Strange Stories” (*Strange Story Club*), in line with the titles used by many postwar pulp publications, much like the “Treehouse of Horror” Halloween specials of *The Simpsons*.

 Here, the “strange,” the oddity, points to another concept widely used in Japan to describe non-normative tastes: the “abnormal,” in its statistical sense.

 
## 1946–1952

 Sources disagree on when the first issue came out; I believe this is due to the changes of name and registration of the publisher, **Akebono Shobo** (曙書房), which became **Tenseisha** (天星社) and later **Akatsuki Shuppan** (暁出版, Osaka). All of them were run by the same chief editor, **Yoshida Minoru** (吉田稔).

 This first period covered scandalous topics about nightlife, generic pornography and sexually explicit stories, but it had not yet focused on SM or kinbaku.

 Between 1945 and 1952 (years 20 to 27 of the *Showa* era), Japan was occupied by Allied troops, who promoted democracy and the modernization of a country that until then had lived in a mix of Victorian morality and chauvinist obscurantism.

 During the military occupation, led by SCAP (Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers), Japan’s prewar censorship offices were dismantled and freedom of the press was proclaimed, which allowed publications of this kind to multiply quickly.

 
## 1952–1967

 Under the publisher Tenseisha (天星社), the format changed to A5, although the paper was still of very poor quality, partly because of the economic hardship the country was going through.

 With the August 1952 issue (year 27 of the *Showa* era), the magazine began to steer its content toward kinbaku (緊縛) and SM, both in its artwork and in its stories, which filled most of its pages for reasons of cost.

 This shift brought a significant rise in sales, but also several shutdowns (in 1955 and 1957), when the official censors ruled that the obscenity laws applied to the publication. In the end, this led to a change of covers to escape the censors’ attention, a change that eventually became one of the magazine’s hallmarks.

 ![Illustration published by Kitan Club in 1955](https://shibari-dojo.online/images/bakushi/bak0005_02.webp) Illustration published by Kitan Club in 1955.

 This period coincides with the end of the military occupation and with the country’s turn toward what was then called “the Japanese economic miracle.”

 In practice, this meant some early years of poverty, with a thriving black market (and the organizations tied to it) and a conservative government that regained control over freedoms and morals, once again imposing forms of censorship and obscenity laws such as the well-known Article 175.

 In this period the magazine also opened up to other marginal fetishes, such as *Ninpu no erotishizumu* (妊婦のエロティシズム, pregnant women), *Kancho purei* (浣腸プレイ, erotic enemas) or *Seppuku koibito* (切腹恋人, lovers involved in *seppuku* or suicide), and maintained a curious collaboration with **John Willie**, creator of *Bizarre*, featuring classic American SM themes given a Japanese twist, such as *Poni purei* (ポニープレイ, pony play) and *Kijo* (騎乗, erotic riding).

 
## 1967–1975

 Now under the publisher Akatsuki Shuppan (暁出版, Osaka), *Kitan Club* reached its highest artistic level and quality in this period, with contributors who are today historical reference points for the Western shibari world, such as **Dan Oniroku**.

 It was a time of cultural openness, of absorbing Western artistic currents and reinterpreting them in a Japanese way.

 ![Kitan Club cover from 1973](https://shibari-dojo.online/images/bakushi/bak0005_03.webp) Kitan Club cover from 1973.

 This historical period coincides with the “economic miracle” (*koseichoki*, 高成長期), which drove the country forward with annual growth above 10%, massive and impersonal urban development, widespread migration from the countryside to the cities and unrestrained consumerism, until it all burst with the 1973 oil crisis.

 During this period, Japanese society became radically Westernized and, with the arrival of the seventies, numerous violent political conflicts broke out between groups of young leftists and conservative governments, as in the rest of the West.

 It was also the period when the yakuza (ヤクザ) reached its peak in Japan, moving its business from extortion and the black market into “entertainment” (prostitution, pornography and gambling) and into other financial sectors where money is easy to launder.

 This era also made pornographic film popular. Shooting and distributing a short story, first on Super 8 and later on VHS, was much cheaper than publishing a magazine, so the emerging video market gradually took the place of magazines and, in March 1975 (year 50 of the *Showa* era), *Kitan Club* published its last issue.

 It was a pity for lovers of memorabilia, but those of us who enjoy kinbaku without caring much about the medium were able to move from looking at photographs to watching moving images by the same creators who had been part of the magazine’s regular team.

 
## Names

 The magazine’s writers included Dan Oniroku (団鬼六), **Chigusa Tadao** (千草忠夫), **Nureki Chimuo** (濡木痴夢男), **Tsujimura Takashi** (辻村隆) and **Numa Shozo** (沼正三).

 Among its illustrators and photographers were **Itoh Seiu** (伊藤晴雨), **Harukawa Namio** (春川ナミオ), **Oka Takashi** (岡孝), **Minomura Kou** (美濃村晃), who also signed as **Kita Reiko** (喜多玲子) and whose real name was **Suma Toshiyuki** (須磨利之), **Shima Takashi** (嶋孝志), **Kitahara Junko** (北原淳子), **Suku Gurote** (スク・グローテ) and **Ozuma Kaname** (小妻要).

 Its models included **Ibuki Masako** (息吹真佐子), **Otsuka Keiko** (大塚圭子), **Kasuga Rumi** (春日留美), **Kawabata Tanako** (川端田菜子), **Kawabe Satoko** (川辺里子) and **Kinukawa Fumiyo** (絹川ふみ代).

 
## Critical analysis

 Japanese publications of this kind, devoted to showing how eroticism in its most “extreme” forms was lived in their culture and time, tend to be either attacked by their detractors or exalted by their followers.

 On one side, and especially within the Western shibari-kinbaku community, these titles are revered as a kind of “bible” to idolize and admire.

 Beyond the artistic value of the hundreds of stories and photographs they published lies their historical value.

 Indeed, *Kitan Club* was the seed and great disseminator of what we now understand as shibari or kinbaku and, for many people (myself included), the gateway into this world through its images, since we could get little out of the stories in Japanese.

 On the other side are those who regard the publication, or the very existence of these expressions of erotic desire, as something baleful, even diabolical, and call for it to be banned, brandishing moral discourses inspired by Protestant Victorianism.

 More recently, voices have also emerged criticizing its excessive machismo, the way it portrays women, or even the lack of explicit consent in many of the situations depicted in its pages.

 Of course, judging mid-twentieth-century publications from a country and a society that are entirely foreign to us through a contemporary Western lens is not a good idea.

 But neither should we whitewash precisely those things that, by our own present-day standards, we consider to have no place in a civilized society that aspires to justice.

 While preparing this article I came across a study, “The Ideological History of SM: Dreams and Desires Regarding Domination and Violence in Post-War Japan,” by **Kawahara Azumi**, which asks “what did those who identified as sadists and masochists think and say about their desires for domination and violence?” and links the phenomenon of SM publications to the limits of modern norms about human nature, such as autonomy, independence, consent and desire.

 Without doubt, a whole field still to explore.

 
## Where to find Kitan Club today

 Copies of the magazine can still be found in specialist bookshops, both online and in person. A good part of it has also been digitized.

 
### Nawa-art.com

 This site, titled *Natsukashiki Kitan Kurabu* (懐かしき奇譚クラブ, “Nostalgia for Kitan Club”), is a digital collection started in 2010 by **Kuroneko Ki** (くろねこ記) to share digitized issues of *Kitan Club*.

 The collection aims to evoke memories for enthusiasts, with no academic pretensions. It is in Japanese, and its format and structure are not very user-friendly by today’s standards.

 
### Kitan Club Archive

 **Kitan Club Archive** is an open translation and digital preservation lab devoted to rescuing the legacy of *Kitan Club*. Driven by **HansF**, it takes a collaborative, experimental approach to recovering, contextualizing and translating these historical materials.

 Available in English, the site lets you browse the magazines page by page and take part in an AI-assisted translation process that combines direct viewing with optical character recognition (OCR) and relies on the **Gemini 3** model.

 Its central goal is to test the platform’s usability and bring in specialists who can review results, fine-tune models and refine the translations, in order to build an evolving digital archive.

 
## Further reading

 The book *Kitan Kurabu kara Uramado e* (『奇譚クラブ』から『裏窓』へ, From “Kitan Club” to “Uramado”), by **Iida Toyokazu** (飯田豊一), known as Nureki Chimuo (濡木痴夢男), was published by **Ronsosha** (論創社) in late 2013 (ISBN 978-4846012885).

 It offers an in-depth analysis of postwar underground magazines such as *Kitan Club*, focusing on authors such as **Azuma Shin**, Numa Shozo, **Tsuchiro Soichi** and **Furukawa Yuko**, and on works such as *Kachikujin Yapu* (家畜人ヤプー) and *Yakoto*. It reveals SM culture in post-imperial Japan, as the author went from contributor to editor of *Uramado* (the magazine that succeeded *Kitan Club*).


## Custom Fields

**Content Type — The formal and communicative nature of a piece of content, based on its documentary function.:** Review

**Knowledge Type — The nature of knowledge according to its role within practice.:** Scene

**Field of Study — The specific area of practice that the content focuses on.:** History

**Corpus — A structured body of reference knowledge that underpins the content.:** Industry

**Criteria — A cross-cutting perspective that defines the emphasis or intent from which the content is approached.:** Entertainment

**Summary — A brief synthesis of the content that presents its main topics, purpose, or most relevant aspects.:** The Japanese magazine that shaped SM and kinbaku: eroticism, censorship and counterculture in postwar Japan.