Kitan Club magazine was first published in 1947 in Japan and was illustrated with nude men and women, rope and bondage, and plenty of S&M. Many highly acclaimed erotic artists had their work published in the magazine.
The magazine had hundreds of pages per edition, many editions per year, and ran for over 50 years. Some people have digitized those pages. I was lucky to download a copy of the archive some years ago — 70,000 pages that provide an inside view of bondage’s evolution and some beautiful pieces of art. In it you can see multiple elements of Western bondage and many fantasy writings.
To help with translation, I used OCR — optical character recognition.
This has helped me think of new rope bondage inspired by old-school shibari artists, and also given me an inside look at the culture with reference points through time.
