Speaker 1: 00:00 The comeback and Omnicon is an adult podcast intended for

mature audiences. It involves themes of alternative sexuality,

explicit language, education, and other mild moral peril. Critical
thinking is advised.

Speaker 2: 00:13 [inaudible]

Speaker 3: 00:23 hello and welcome to the Kabaka Novacan, your audio guide to
the world Japanese bondage. I'm Fabiola and I'll be your copilot
as we explore the background to the developments of erotic
Japanese bondage. Imagine a girl, Sadako is her name. Her
family had served the Tokugawa's for generations in 1868 her
grandfather had served under the Shogun, Yoshi, Nobu, and the
Topo Fushimi war. Her father was a member of the Shogi tie, a
war hero who later rose up the government ranks to become a
senior official at the Ministry of Agriculture and commerce.
Sadly, Sadako lost everything. Her father who wants doted on
her, died in an accident while off on a business trip, and so she
was put into the care of an uncle and aunt. Chronicle was kind,
but her aunt less so and only pretended to like Sadako while the
uncle was around. Eventually when the money for Santikos care
ran out, the aunt had no more use for her.

Speaker 3: 01:17 As the story goes, being dependent on her aunt's goodwill,
Sadika was made to do harsh chores and she was beaten with a
metal tip, smoking pipe or a ruler for even small mistakes being
treated so poor. Sadako couldn't find a day of happiness yet
because this was always done when the uncle was out of the
house. Her uncle was completely unaware of it. One day the
uncle was a way to Tokyo for a few days. During his absence,
the aunt went to the tea shelf where she kept the sliced Mochi
cake, but it was gone. The house cat, Mika, had run off with it.
Nevertheless, the aren't treated Sadako as if she had done it.
Sadako, not knowing what had happened, cried that she didn't
know anything about it, whereupon the art became furious. She
said there was no one else in the house, so if you're going to lie
and steal and hype things, I'm going to read in your backside for
it.

Speaker 3: 02:12 The [inaudible] grabbed innocent Sadako and tighter around
and around with a thin cloth belt sane for stealing food. You can
start with not eating. This will teach you not to steal and lie.
Sadako was put in a closet at the back of the room and she sat
there alone from morning to night and into the next morning
without a bite of food. She hungered through the long summer
day and her sweat dripped in the heat and humidity at night.
The mosquitoes came out and there's no need to tell of the pain
and suffering. She felt. Sadako story here is from a 1916
 collection of sad tales and it's just one of the countless bondage
scenes one can find in the pre war period and before the public
sm scene. I love Sadako's name. It reminds me of Sada Ebay
who committed the infamous 1936 murder of her lever keeps
you so he's Cheetah, which ended their marathon bout of
drinking and sex with erotic strangulation, castration and
declarations of love initiatives, own blood, Sada and Kiki's.

Speaker 3: 03:13 Those story is told in the 1976 movie and the realm of the
senses and it's available on the criterion collection. The movie is
about as much sex as it is story, but if you're not squeamish, I
definitely recommend it. A few weeks ago I saw the movie with
a few friends at a local theater and I still can't get sat as surreal
singing out of my head talking about both sodas. I think maybe
stories like this might just sum up the whole history of erotic
and Baku. It's real events and fictional stories all blended up and
filter through desire and artistic expression. When we look back
into the past to find out how modern erotic Kabaka developed,
we're confronted right away with a really big challenge. That is,
any understanding we find will come from whatever materials
have survived the past 100 years is easy. There are all the
people alive today who can share their experiences and who
can tell us about earlier people they knew and we still have
massive amounts of records throughout the 20th century that
time hasn't devoured yet.

Speaker 3: 04:20 However, as we start to go farther back, we find ourselves in

times where an erotic interest in bondage and sadomasochism
wasn't a public activity. Fans pursued their interests privately
and in isolation, and as we go farther and farther back, fewer
and fewer accounts and work survive until if we go back far
enough, all we have left is archeology. Thinking about it, it's
easy to believe that people have used rope for tying game and
tying other people for as long as rope has existed. It's maybe
even sensible to guess that there had to be some people who
found Ropa turn on. But what if we want more than guesses?
What if we want a reality based understanding of the
foundations of Erotic Zimbaco? In this case, guesses aren't
enough. So how can we even hope to build an accurate picture
of the history of Japanese bondage? We do what we can with
what we have and we have to be very careful when we put the
pieces we have together that any picture we form isn't just
recreating our own narratives to confirm our own biases.

Speaker 3: 05:30 To make this a little easier. I'm going to limit myself to style to
the origins of those specific elements that make up the
recognizable erotic and Baku we have today. Mainly, this is
going to be the shape of the bondage, eroticism and torment.
 To be honest, I'm a little sad that this means I won't get into the
monkey fish and tree bondage today. I'm not giving up on it
though. I will eventually find some way to work it into episode
at some time when I want to look back into the origins of erotic
Japanese bondage. There are a couple of places I could point to
to use as it start and the earliest will be about the 15 or 16
hundreds however, I'm going to start by going even farther back
than that because I want to address a couple of themes in
issues around talking about erotic Japanese bondage.

Speaker 3: 06:24 Looking back as far as I can going way, way back, the first
examples of bondage or implied bondage I've personally seen
have come from Buddhism. The oldest I can think of is the Fuko
can Jocko Yukon on statue in Nora made in seven 46 Connan
holds a rope men to dispel the illusions of the world or as the
British Museum puts it to capture the minds of the faithful and
there are a few images of the food oh meal made in the early
[inaudible] on period who himself holds his demon capturing
rope. My favorite example is a black and white Ryko sketch data
to 1146 Ryko paintings are a Gianna of pure land Buddhist art in
Japan, which depicts Amida Buddha coming down to a dying
believer in order to escort that believers sole backup to the
western paradise. Now this sketch shows Amida Buddha coming
down to the sole of a very stubborn and unwilling monk.

Speaker 3: 07:20 Amida has looped a cord around the monks neck and is pulling
really hard with both hands while a defined attendant is
standing behind him trying to push him along. The monks heels
are dug into the ground and he straining against the rope and
Amida himself is leaning back muscles flexing with the effort. It
can be really seductive to see something like this and point to it
as some kind of proof that Japanese rope bondage has ancient
roots or is an ancient practice. In fact, we could really just grab
anything that's rope and old and in Japan and use it to claim
some source for erotic and backhoe, you know like hairstyles
that use cord, the keep them in place or the Shimenawa in
Shinto or tying bales or rice or these Buddhist images. But none
of this addresses any particular style of bondage or the ideas of
the people practicing it.

Speaker 3: 08:17 If we wanted to, we could do the same thing with rope bondage
in Europe by talking about the fourth century origins of the
Christian prayer rope with its special hard to undo not, or we
could talk about the rope that Franciscan monks used as belts
and we could use these things to create a spiritual aura of great
antiquity around rope and by extension bondage. As Fun as
doing this might be. I am not convinced that doing it helps us at
all to understand rope bondage and I think this is doubly true in
 the case of Joe Malone pottery, and I want to take the time to
talk about this a bit because I have seen a few English language
rope bondage books at try to link GM on pottery to ancient
traditions of rope use in Japan that is somehow use to fluff up
the image of Orotic [inaudible] Jim on pottery makes for a great
story and it's fantastic for anyone who loves the romance of
tradition or ancient practices with their bondage.

Speaker 3: 09:18 Last year I took a history class that spent some time on the Jo
Malone and Yadi periods and it really made me rethink those
periods. It especially me, me rethink the idea of rape culture
and I've spent the past few months trying to follow up on it
doing this. I am going to be really careful as I touch on this
subject, I can easily stumble into matters of national identity
and identity politics. And the last thing I want to do is
unthinkingly barge through anybody's deeply held personal
beliefs. So I want to frame what I'm going to say strictly within
orotic bondage and the issues around promoting an idea of
ancient rope traditions for the purpose of enhancing a story
about Japanese bondage. New discoveries are still being made
about the Jo Malone and Yayoy periods. And the conversation is
ongoing. I am definitely not going to be making any grand
statements about entire societies.

Speaker 3: 10:19 I am not qualified, but hopefully I can incite some thinking
about bondage. With regard to culture, I've seen a couple of
Japanese language sm fan sites that do mention Joe mom
pottery when talking about Combach Aao, more generally, I've
seen Japanese bondage, how to books and videos and sites that
claim that erotic Japanese rope bondage is a product of
Japanese society. For example, the bondage artists Masato
Muray talks about it on the website for his first set of uh, how
to DVDs. And he says, and I quote, as far as SMS concerned,
Kumbhaka techniques are specific to Japan and have been
passed down from old times before the late 19th century
female prisoners had been punished by being tied with strong
rope and paraded around can Baku could be said to be the
development and realization of the fantasies and obsessions.
These onlookers experienced also go our ACA in his book of five
rings for Rope says wrapping, folding and tying is a sphere in
which the Japanese people excel.

Speaker 3: 11:25 We see that exists everywhere in the Japanese lifestyle. So can
Bucky was a cultural form constructed by the Japanese people I
single rope changes in many ways. The expressive power to find
many things out of a few is a Japanese wisdom more than
anything else. It seems that Japanese language, sm information
made available to the public seems to link Orotic Japanese
 bondage to the previous bondage done during Japan's later
feudal period and particularly the Edo period, meaning the 16 to
the 18 hundreds in that makes sense because a systemized form
of tying people did develop during that time and it had a huge
impact on people's imagination given that so much points to the
fuel era and given the surviving materials themselves. It just
seems really weird to me that anybody would reach back more
than 12,000 years for pieces of pottery, but that's exactly what
some people choose to do.

Speaker 3: 12:25 I kind of imagine what if damsel in distress fans reached back
5,000 years to the court where culture in Europe. Before I get
any more into this, I should probably give you an overview of
both the Jo Malone and Yayoy periods. The Jomon period is the
time roughly between 10,500 BCE and the third century BCE,
and the name of this period which is widely mentioned, comes
from the pottery dated to that period which is decorated with
marks left by pressing rope into the clay. The yayoy culture is
roughly from the third century BCE to the third century CE just
in case these dates don't sound very helpful. Maybe think about
the borderline between the Jo Malone and Yayoy periods as the
life of Alexander the Great or the lifetime of Aristotle. Now,
what I think makes the Jalon period problematic for anybody
who wants to use it as an origin story for Japanese rope
bondage are two things.

Speaker 3: 13:24 First is that the [inaudible] period gets used to push an idea that
since rope use in Japan goes back to the gym on period, it
means today's orotic bondage is an extension of rope culture
imbued with ancient tradition and overall cultural and spiritual
awesomeness. I'm not arguing at all against their being
longstanding attitudes about tying in Japanese society. I do
believe that tying in Japan does create a background that tends
to draw some people's interests towards rope. You know, just
as there are other aspects of society that get express through
bondage. The two examples by moray and are you sue a, I just
gave show a little bit of that attitude. However, just because
something happens in the same geographical area doesn't
automatically make it the same. Culture wrote markings May to
decorate. Pottery says that people liked the decorations. It
doesn't say anything about what other roles wrote played in
that society or in the culture at large or what people thought
about rope or what importance wrote may have had in their
lives.

Speaker 3: 14:29 It's really hard to be certain of anything when all we have is
prehistoric archeology. We're missing the actual voices of those
people themselves, but tell us who they were and what they
 thought. What archeology so far does tell us is that the
gentleman peoples were a stone age society that lived off of
hunting, fishing, and some plant husbandry. They're famous.
Pottery was made by coiling, the clay pressing. It's smooth and
in low firing it. The Yoga people and culture. On the other hand,
we're a bronze iron society with wet rice cultivation. There
pottery was made on a potter's wheel which was in high fired
and it has own distinctive shapes and decorative styles. There
are several sometimes contradictory positions about how the
Jomon period became the io period. The Best I can work out
from all of it is that there was an immigration to southwest
Japan from the continent that brought in new ideas and cost a
massive shift in life in Japan.

Speaker 3: 15:31 It appears that this new [inaudible] people and the spreading
[inaudible] culture marks the beginnings of what we think of
now as the Japanese people and the Japanese culture. I am
definitely no archeologist, but if this is true, then saying
Japanese rope bondage somehow stretches back 12,000 years
because of Joe mom pottery would be kind of like saying
American knife play goes back 8,000 years because of the native
American Clovis Stone Blades. I could see how it can be really
seductive to believe or even just imagine that the erotic
bondage we do today is somehow part of an unbroken line.
Going back into the mists of time, but even if I don't have good
answers for this, I do have enough doubt about the details to be
skeptical about such claims. Therefore, I think the best place to
start looking for the origins of modern can you are with what
the sm fans have borrowed and what they think about it.

Speaker 3: 16:28 Now that that's out of the way. Let's get onto the good part, the
15 hundreds this is the first of three areas that I'm going to
argue for as the predecessors to erotic, modern Japanese
bondage. I'm going to argue this in part because if I were to
imagine Combach you as an actual real piece of rope, the three
strands that get twisted together to make that rope would be
one. The emergence of specific systems of rope bondage and
torture to the domestic non official ways of tying people and
three, the development of a fairly consistent language of
representing bondage and sadism in the arts in all of its
dramatic and imaginative ways to make my mental image just a
little more ridiculous. I'm going to imagine that sm play today
involves choosing fibers and how we trust the strands together
and how we process the rope and then however we use it.

Speaker 3: 17:26 At this point, I have to emphasize that everything I've been
talking about and everything I'm going to be covering here is all
coming from on. I've been able to follow. I live in California, so
 while I spent a lot of time dredging through Japanese University
Museum in government archives, I know it's not the same thing
as spending all those hours browsing in person to the in this
time period that I know I have and then I know the size and
shape of our within the explicitly sexual pornography and within
random chunks and blocks of dates from the newspapers over
the years. The holes that I know I don't know are all the stories
and records that I haven't bumped into yet. I can't say how
much these holes might impact the whole narrative, but
hopefully the whole, we'll keep shrinking as I work on them.
That said, I really could just narrow the subject down to the mid
20th century looking at what bondage was appearing in pop
culture or looking at what the s and publications we're talking
about and what fans and artists leaders shared about the early
days.

Speaker 3: 18:28 I think just that alone might be enough to give a very useful
picture of the start of modern orotic [inaudible]. That's because
it was these mid 20th century sm fans who took the types of
time that they wanted and put them in the order that they
wanted and did it satisfy their own desires and it was this
group's bondage that later generations built on and I think that
should be enough and it is more than enough if our goal is play,
but personally, I want more than that. I don't just want to know
the symbolism or to be able to list the fetishes. I want to
participate. I want to know all the tools in the toolbox and know
how to use them. This matters to me because ultimately these
older expressions of bondage have been absorbed into sm play
and they fueled fantasies about bondage for generations.

Speaker 3: 19:19 Now and the better that I know them, the more I can use them
and enjoy them. Yet at the same time, as influential as he's
older expressions are, they are not themselves. Our modern
style of erotic bondage play Hito music. Gucci was the author of
turning out widgets to a how to book on the Martial Art of Rope
capture and he talks about the difference between Ho Jujitsu
and neurotic and Baku in it. He says, this goes without saying,
but the superficial appearance of torture bindings might make
some people associate them with flashy Kumbhaka methods
and sm, but sm came on the scene and what are known as
Kumbhaka photo collections and there is a fundamental
difference in techniques too. There are a considerable number
of sm books and video labels and I've looked into the methods
of well known teachers in that world. Speaking only about
binding and tying techniques.

Speaker 3: 20:11 Right now I've reached the conclusion that Tory knowledge Jitsu
is completely unrelated to it. It's fair to say the common
 characteristics between both techniques are not the same at all.
For that reason. From a restraint and aesthetic point of view, I
haven't referenced the kinds of techniques used in sm. As the
great majority of friends and readers of this book have expected
it differs by 180 degrees. Of course, mine is just a narrow single
view and preconception. Let me point out that the source of the
feelings of discrimination and contempt I've expressed come
from not being involved in it. That's a strong opinion. It also
makes me want to know more about this erotic code you did so
I've been hearing in English lately. Okay. Before we dive into the
15 hundreds I'd actually like to step back a little bit farther to
1383 first because there is a version of a text I want to share.

Speaker 3: 21:02 The title is, and please forgive my awkward interpretation, but
the title is the great account of repaying debts of gratitude to
our parents. This definitely isn't our modern erotic Conoco
either, but I think it shows the early signs of ideas that's going to
become really familiar soon. This 1383 volume covers 10
Buddhist blessings that children get from their parents. It also
shows one of the consequences for unfillable children in the
back there. It's an illustration of the lowest level of hell inside a
gated enclosure. Fire spreads across the ground like grass while
demons churn a cauldron full of boiling metal to throw people
into. The most interesting part of it for me are the humans.
Most of them are stripped down to the waist. Their wrists are
tied, crossed behind their backs, around posts planted in the
ground and their hair is also tied to the posts.

Speaker 3: 21:58 Now here we have a few of the classic bondage elements, hands
tied behind the back, crossed wrists tied to posts, partial nudity
and torment. There's even two other deep comparisons. Fire-
Breathing sneaks are said to reside in this hell and there's this
one 1883 image of the same scene where the sneakers wrapped
herself around a man and his biting his foot. And it really
reminds me of the sneak torture that um, we can see in kind of
sm and pre ESM stuff later on. Also in the 1383 image. A couple
of the humans are bound in the type of wooden neck and wrists
docs that we can see in later early sm photographs and also in
some of idos works as well. Okay. Now we get to the 15
hundreds and now we have everyone's favorite predecessor, Ho
Jujitsu Ho digit. Sue is the martial art of Rope capture.

Speaker 3: 22:55 It's also known as Tory knowledge. It's a, it's a part of Jujitsu and
it's divided into two areas. One is the fast binding techniques
and the other is the formal binding techniques. Fast bindings
are used to overpower and subdue an opponent while formal
bindings are useful restraining prisoners while doing things like
escorting them, displaying them and executing them. The fast
 binding ties are relatively simple. While the formal binding ties
can be quite complex. I've gone through about two dozen books
on Hoe Jujitsu published from the 18 hundreds to about 1931 of
them I like is from 1918 it's the practice manual of Japanese
martial arts. The whole Jujitsu section is written by two men, a
martial arts instructor named Aymoray Shibata and the Honda
Dan Miura School Ho Jujitsu instructor, Denzel Borough Eda.
They date the start of rope bondage as a system of restraint to
the 1530s with the Takeuchi school and the describe how Jujitsu
as a part of Jujitsu and they write what originally came to be Ho
Jujitsu was born out of Jujitsu and also has a variety of ways to
capture someone, but in attempting to capture an outlaw who
is a live in being and will resist being apprehended, just
memorizing one way means there's a fear he'll escape.

Speaker 3: 24:19 Therefore in this case, one must perform the art of adapting
oneself to the moment. Some of that sounds a lot like the
advice given even now in Kabaka doesn't it? Early in the 16
hundreds the chaotic centuries of war calmed down as the Toga
Gower regime unified and pacified the country under its
control. For the next 250 years, the warrior class became the
administration and judicial class and hotel Jitsu became a law
enforcement technique. I think it's no coincidence that in this
more peaceful time with a recognizable form of rope bondage
being visible, if not familiar to the populations of the larger
cities, that the bondage in stories and art of the time would
start to resemble her Jujitsu ties. Even the early 16 hundreds of
versions of that 1383 health scene now show rope around the
upper body and arms. But I'm jumping ahead along with this
piece time law enforcement came the Digicel system and with
that came a range of really cruel and unusual interrogation
techniques and punishments that used rope.

Speaker 3: 25:25 There's an 1893 book titled Detailed Explanations of

punishments written by Osa Hero Sackama and he was a
magistrate in the southern district of Tokyo during the
[inaudible] period and he introduces the period by saying after
the owning era, 1467 to 1469 rival chiefs all over held onto their
own spheres of influence. There was disturbance and unrest
and each nation state its own household, each headstrong in its
ways, unable to unify in time. The Tokugawa's brought an end
to the war. A way of peace was foremost in their thoughts.
Government existed through will and quickly understanding a
need for a system of punishment. Establish the 1615 imperial
court articles through this law is regulated military houses and
beyond advising ordinary rules. That third shogun him itsue
established a conference chamber lasting until the 1630s
magistrates were put in place and impose them to govern
 prisons. Perhaps this was the beginning of the development of
Tokugawa criminal law.

Speaker 3: 26:31 Thereafter, they clarified and extended all confusion rules
comparing and choosing clear laws and indeed following them
at the time and that marked the completion of the first
generation of coded punishments by the 1740s Saca goes into
court procedures in great detail. He describes how prisoners
were handled. He lists prisons and varying punishments and he
describes who carried out the punishments and how they were
done. In that quote, Sakamoto refers to the 1742 rule book for
government officials, which we get the four famous
interrogation tortures, two of them. The prawn torment and the
suspension torment will become a big sexy DL later in case
you're not already familiar with these interrogation tortures. I'll
read the Meiji University criminology department descriptions
of them all. Four tortures use rope maintain university, says the
prisoner was stripped and has hands tied behind his back in a
cross shape, but I'll just read the prawn and suspension
torments because these get directly borrowed into sm.

Speaker 3: 27:33 According to the Meiji University quote, the prawn torment
when they couldn't get a confession from both beating and
stone pressing the perform the prawn torment, torture. The
prawn torment was also called the box torment. It was carried
out inside a torture house. The bet that used a twisted rope
made out of a raw hemp and material to tie the hands and back
and capture the feet in front. The rope was then brought up to
the shoulders and pulled with a jerk to bring the feet up to the
head. Having done that, the body is curved like a shrimp.
Circulation is restricted and it is extremely painful. Tied for
about a short time. The body first begins to sweat and turn a
deep red. After that, the body next changes to a purple after an
hour and then it becomes a dark blue. Still the prisoner was
released when he became pale.

Speaker 3: 28:26 The prisoner was untied and return to jail when they became
pale because he'd reached the point near death. Yet it said that
there were a few people who endured it to that point.
Suspension torment. The suspicion torment was also carried out
in the torture house. The method was to tie the hands behind
the back of a prisoner who had been stripped of his clothing.
Raw, twisted hempen cord was tied thickly as additional rope
over paper wrapped around the hands. The end of the rope was
passed through a ring in the ceiling and attached to a post. The
prisoner was lifted as far as 11 centimeters off the ground. The
twisted hemp rope was used for a certain amount of time in this
 case as well, and as it bit into the painful flesh, it caused loss of
circulation and it said to have been extremely painful.

Speaker 3: 29:13 It has also been said that these same suspensions lasted even
two or three hours until blood salts stripped from the toenails.
Mm. Blood Salts. Anyway, if you'd like to see the suspension
Torman inaction, go to youtube and check out the movie. The
human condition. These methods were interrogation tortures,
punishments that involved rope where Xcel punishments that
transport at a tide prisoner. There were crucifixions beheadings
and tying in a box with their heads sticking out than sawing that
head off as gruesome as some of those sound. There were
others that were even worse than that. The 1836 big book of
secret punishments shows a number of these things and I'm, I'll
put a couple images up on the show notes for you. By the way,
something else I've seen on several English language, rope
bondage websites that try to give a history of erotic, who is this
idea that rope bondage was created in Japan because there
weren't any jails in the old days.

Speaker 3: 30:12 However, Japanese writings and pictures from those times have
no problem showing and talking about jails suck. A Mus lists of
prisons alone should put that to rest. Even on the fiction side.
One 1682 version of Sakaki Horas erotic story life of an amorous
man has this illustration of a couple in jail. Each person is in a
separate cell with guard standing outside the cells holding these
long barbed poles. And I really liked the Agora Amita story that
has, um, a part where characters are in prison. There's this part
that says for the time being, they were put into the eastern
prison at Cami den Macho. The prison at that time was
classified into the East prison, West prison, peasant prison,
homeless prison, women's prison, the [inaudible] and the
[inaudible]. The Samurai and Shinto priest entered through the,
uh, guys that cheeky under the Tokugawa banner leading to the
cells.

Speaker 3: 31:09 A Godo had lots of acquaintances in the East prison. There's also
this other part where a character he could do is being tortured
in the prawn torment. Um, here are a few quotes from it. Kin
Bay says, still won't talk, Huh? He could use sets. What a fool.
There's not a single coward and Oh, my adas gang who
confessed a such a thing. You're a witty guy. Keen Bay says if
you won't talk, I'll stick a hand in the ropes and twist hard. I
think it break your arms. So how bad he could, you still don't
want to talk later he could use says, ha ha ha getting mad. Well,
why don't you torture me hard? Somar Kanbay says you're a
tough guy. He could choose, says, hey, you there, untie me.
You've done an awful thing. I've gambled and mistreated by
 body my whole life. But these past few days or the first time I've
seen my own, but so you can see that these ideas were
swimming around in society.

Speaker 3: 32:08 Still Rope bondage use by law enforcement wasn't the only
bonded around. However, I'd say this other is less a style of
bondage than it is ideas of tying people. And that is domestic
punishment. Um, Sadako story is one example of that. A few
19th century retellings of Santo die. You have the brother and
sister tied and brought before his son to be punished for trying
to escape. And Yoshi. Toshi made one too in his 1875 modern
pictures for instruction at that one shows a mother beating her
bad son who is tied to a post. Another kind of rope used for
punishment can be found in the history of torture and
punishment by Yoyo Noah who points out a few punishments
done to women in the red light districts. Two of those that I
think are worth mentioning are at the water torture, which I
think needs no explanation and then there's the punishment.

Speaker 3: 33:02 We know today in sm as the two Nuki tie, it's a tie where the
woman's wrists and ankles are tied together and then she's
lifted up into the air and then beaten. Another more general
use of rope to restrain is in the case of tying small children
either by the wrist or their bodies that keep them from
wandering off. There even happened to be a couple of funny
prince about this. Um, in what I'll call like prince of strong
babies. These are toddlers who have been tied to either like
large bales of rice or like potted trees and they like dragged
them around behind them as they crawl. There are other
examples of tying and things like kidnappings or punishing
servants or restraining the violently mentally ill. Many of these
aren't the popular forms that we use in modern Compasio, but
they're still woven through a lot of sm fantasies and you'll still
see them from time to time.

Speaker 3: 33:53 The third strand of my imaginary predecessor rope is the arts.
The Arts is where I have a debate with myself. In one way I
could have argued that it's the arts that had the biggest impact
on sm play because the photos and illustrations in the early sm
years closely resembled the bondage in those old illustrations.
On top of that, the Essa magazines devoted sections to bondage
scenes in movies or television and there were lots of articles
about old bonded stories and art. Then there are all the fictional
stories in those magazines too, but at the same time, I could
also argue that lots of this art was representing historical
bondage in some way. If not how Jujitsu or the official tortures
themselves. Then similar situations, the old sm magazines had
Hudges of photo sets with explanations. They had articles about
 the tortures they compared European and medieval tortures
and the feudal tortures in Japan and there were the occasional
detailed descriptions of Christian persecution in Japan.

Speaker 3: 34:56 The influences on both sides of this argument are still being
used today, yet it's Ho Jujitsu that gets the biggest share of air
time. When talking about the history of [inaudible], it is the easy
grab. Maybe only Kabuki prince get anything close to the same
attention. It's kind of convoluted. Someone today might
suspend a pregnant woman upside down as an homage to Edo
suspension and Edo suspension was his way to try out Yoshi
Toshiba picture of the loan, the house on a Daci more, which
itself was a version of other illustrations of the same story and it
also shares that popular way of representing bondage that looks
similar to hold Jujitsu tying. It's so mixed together today. Today.
I don't think I'll ever be able to stop my internal debate, but it's
a fun debate and I only do it for fun anyway, a little bit earlier I
had mentioned psychology.

Speaker 3: 35:48 We Hora, he was a poet living in the 16 hundreds who later
turned to skills to writing popular humorous social critiques.
Ihara is credited as being a founder of [inaudible] Art Ihara
wrote for his urban audiences and his subjects jump from
position to sometimes contradictory position in one story he'll
praise love for women and then in another story he'll praise
love for men. Paul Gordon Shallow and I hope I'm pronouncing
his name right, rights and introduction to his translation of Yara
as great mirror of male love, shallow quotes, an unnamed
source that says something I think is really neat. The source says
that these stories about women deal with the same human
passion but remind us of the truer human experience that
pleasures are fleeting, that enjoyments are small and that both
have their place in experience as well as coin. I like that. Overall,
there seemed to be an endless amount of storybooks from the
16 hundreds to the 18 hundreds that have bondage in them.

Speaker 3: 36:48 Some of them are really famous like the [inaudible] or
[inaudible] that were told over and over again based on the
number of versions that were done. Since you die, you must
have been really popular and the story is still being retold in the
modern world. You can find it in English as Sancha the bailiff.
The illustrations aren't what we expect when we think of Buki
away. You know, they're not the highly detailed vibrantly
colored prints. Instead, the illustrations in these story books are
often simple black and white images of varying skill, but the
bondage and the Gore and the drama are all still really clear.
Even from the beginning of the 16 hundreds tying in pictures
has that recognizable form. It's the risk cross behind the back
 with the remaining rope wrapped in some way around the
body. This form of tying is repeated over and over in some
combination of either the rope from the risks going around the
upper arms or up around the neck or around the upper arms
and chest, and the risk positions are everywhere behind the
back, um, and often low on the body.

Speaker 3: 37:54 I think in almost all these cases to the remaining rope isn't
finished up on the body like we do it today instead. Often the
robins are tied off to an object, like a post or a tree, and
sometimes a person stands behind controlling the Robbins. Of
course, this isn't the only kind of bonded shown, but it's so
frequent, so overwhelming. In fact, it's so overwhelming that it's
no surprise that the goatee Shibari today is as popular as it is.
This we have tying is so common that even made its way into
propaganda. You might've heard the story about prisoners
being tied and put on a horse to be paraded around before
taking to the execution grounds. I've seen illustrations for this in
stories like the Thai Hakey in a 1690s and going on in Chicago
stories in the 17 and 18 hundreds I'm not sure how to describe
going Oni Chicara.

Speaker 3: 38:46 He's both and outlaw and a hero. Maybe he's not the hero we
want, but he's the hero we need or something like that.
Anyway, there's a [inaudible] Nishikawa storybook from 1851
there's a scene in it that shows a close up of Ishikawa on the
back of a horse. His arms are tied behind his back with two
pounds of rope around the arms. He surrounded by a hoard of
grubby guards with spears and holding signs and a few Samurai
with their spike poles up ahead in the parade is she called his
wife. She's tied onto our own horse, but her arms are tied down
to her sides and the color of her clothes are pulled back
revealing her sexy, sexy neck. In this story. She calla is executed
by being thrown into a boiling pot and it's at this moment that
they also throw, he should call a son in with him and there's this
dramatic scene where Ishikawa lifts his son up over his head to
try to save him and liquid flows and waterfalls over the pot and
steam rises from East Chicago is boiling body.

Speaker 3: 39:48 It's really horrific and really awesome. Now in 1893 a picture
book was published detailing the cruelties of the old took a gala
government and contrasting it out with the more modern and
enlightened methods of the new Meiji government. This book
has the same scene and I mean the same scene right down to
the same number of weapons of the same type and the same
hilly wooded background. There are a few differences though,
like the tide woman being placed behind the man instead of in
front and her hands are tied up behind her. The signs and
 banners and the guards postures are also different and they
match those in the big secret book of punishments. I have to
wonder if this is more than coincidence. So many of the details
of the same that I find it difficult to imagine that it is just
coincidence especially since there are so many other images of
this kind of scene that are done differently.

Speaker 3: 40:41 I'll put this 1893 propaganda image up on the podcast blog for
you along with the link to the Meiji University copy. Okay. That
comparison was kind of confusing and I think I confused myself
so let me rephrase it. There are three images of the tide man on
a horse. The three that are super similar. One is from the 1836
big book of punishments. The other is from the 1851 story
about going on Ishikawa and the other is from the 1893 pictorial
book on the Penal Affairs of the Tokugawa government. I hope
that's better and I apologize if I'm flooding you with names up,
but one of the great benefits of doing a podcast is I can always
go back and get into each of these in depth and I do plan on
doing it. As I had mentioned in the introductory episode last
January, pornography had been banned by the government
during the Edo period, but it didn't stop it from being made and
even some of that pornography had bondage in it too.

Speaker 3: 41:42 I have seen bondage illustrations, any whores erotic work, but
given that there are erotic stories, it's still not full on porn and
the bunches itself is kind of unsexy. There are also lots of
images of bondage across the picture. Books and prince, they
are spiced up with nudity and there are different scenarios
where I can totally imagine that this is meant to be sexy if not
outright stimulating yet I haven't gone through enough of the
eight periods Xanga itself to feel like I can give you a good
description of the place bondage has in it. This is one of those
times when digging through archives and auctions just hasn't
paid off for me. The explicit sexual images that I have seen all
seem to be more nonconsensual in nature rather than bondage,
love, play the Tyson. Those are also the same hands behind with
rope around the upper body and a couple or even by a well
known artists like Hoka Tsai who created that famous, a great
wave print and Cuny Sada and Kuniyoshi.

Speaker 3: 42:41 I want you to see these pictures for yourself instead of me just
trying to give you an overview of them. So I'm going to put links
again up on the blog to the different ones on sm pdf view check
out and you'll notice that even the Shingo bondage still has that
recognizable form of time as we now leave the Edo period and
move into the late 18 hundreds we find ourselves in a time
when Japan was opening back up to the world and was quickly
trying to modernize the first modern newspapers in Japan were
 being polished at this time and in the 1870s and eighties there
was a vogue among these newspapers were printing full color
broadsheets that told wildly tabloidy stories. For example, in
1875 the Osaka full color news published an account where a
female servants schemed to rob the house of the widow she
worked for by making it look like a robbery.

Speaker 3: 43:33 This print shows an illustration of the woman and the thief.
They stand close together. The thief has a bag of stolen goods
thrown over his back and the woman is tied to a post. The thief
leans in while the woman's stretches herself forward to either
whisper in his ear or to give them a kiss. Her hands are tied
behind your back and the ropes loop around her body and just
above the top most ropes. The Hem of a robe is pulled aside to
reveal abreast. Another example is from Tokyo Daily News. This
one's from 1873 and it's an opinion piece criticizing what I'm
guessing is polyamory. The image shows a man messing around
on the floor with two sisters while he sticks one leg up to tease
the mother who was tied up to a post. She does not look happy
about it. Broad sheets like these show bondage for everything
from murderers to domestic abuse.

Speaker 3: 44:23 To capture criminals and a number of them are outright erotic
too. Though there are no more explicit than exposed breasts.
Surprisingly, the bondage here, it looks a lot like the bondage
done in the early sm photos. It's a combination of just kind of
roughly wining the rope around and round with something that
looks a lot like whoa. Jujitsu with, you know, at the wraps
around the upper arms and neck. During this time, the really
famous [inaudible] artists, Yoshi sheet was working for some of
these newspapers. Yoshi, Toshi is well known for is graphically
brutal art. Sm Fans around the world like to point out the
bondage and some of these brutal pictures. But I think Yoshi,
Toshi gets a really bad rap, although he did do some
wonderfully gruesome pictures. He was illustrating for
newspapers and working during a really chaotic time. There
were many other artists drawing equally, if not more horrific
violence at the same time, Yoshi till she was, however really
great at what he did and he stands out.

Speaker 3: 45:26 So the next time you're looking at Yoshi, Toshi is printed the
lonely house in a DACI more with the pregnant woman
suspended upside down and the demon hag sharpening her
knife. I'd like you to think of Osaka Daily News of an 1875 print
by Shika hero showing the jealous wife holding the carved out
genitals of her rival in her own bloody hands, which he later
serves to her husband as a snack. Yeah. In Happier News, the
1900 saw a lot of changes that will have a direct impact on
 bondage. The arts in particular, we're going through something
of a revelation to break free of the old rules and to inject
realism. New Theater emerged. The naturalist writers, we're
breaking ground with what would be criticized at the time as
perverted and masochistic fiction. The writer, Oh Guy Maury
wrote a short story version of [inaudible] that we mentioned
earlier, and the director of Music Gucci picked it up for his
classic 1954 movie.

Speaker 3: 46:24 Sacha, the bailiff, and although Guy Morei tried to distance
himself from the naturalist writers, he still wrote [inaudible]
sexualis during the early 19 hundreds the erotic protest, not
since movement also began and old story books were now
becoming story magazines and book compilations. If you
remember from last time sale Ito was working during this period
and he had something to say about new theater in artistic
action dramas rebelled against the Meiji era statesman and the
classical theater endowed with this diverse 300 year history.
The scripts they performed were dubbed the new school. That's
because the only had a short history of no more than about 20
years. The new school might've been inferior to the former in
both quality and quantity, but it brought about a complete
restructuring from the point of realism. And I think that until it
reached its current equal status, the new theater couldn't deny
it all.

Speaker 3: 47:18 That would have grown as a gimmick to attract audiences where
the scenes of bound women, even foreign stories didn't escape.
The man with the iron mask and Gulliver's travels were being
printed with a Japanese to the bondage. The world fairy tale
collection published in 1917 has a neat example that I love. It
tells the story of [inaudible] right now. I'd like you to imagine
every image you've ever seen of her Mithias tied to the rock as
his punishment for giving humanity fire. If you're like me, that's
probably an image of Promethean has changed kind of with his
legs and arms out spread. Eagle, pun totally intended in the
Japanese version though. Prometheus's tied completely nude
with his hands crossed behind his back and the remaining rope
tied to Iraq by now. That should sound kind of familiar, right? As
I mentioned before, how did you two books and martial arts
encyclopedias were being published in the early 19 hundreds
the tying sections were directed for police use and they had a
list of rules for proper behavior and it even looks like this list
was just cut and pasted from book to book.

Speaker 3: 48:26 My favorite rule of all is rule number six. It reads, and I'm
quoting rule number six. There are times when a criminal will
violently resist and as abusive and one will apply strong Kibaki
 Baku to pacify such obstinacy. In such cases the capture may
strongly come who the criminal in anger, which when left tied
for a long time stops the blood flow and injures health. And for
those of you with quick years, yes, that was the word
[inaudible] something like this is a big reason why I say erotic
[inaudible] because when we're talking about sm play, of course
there's going to be eroticism and all the great feelings, but
when Kabaka was used in one of these types of situations, then
I think there's no expectation of connection or anything like
that. Although the early 19 hundreds are getting closer and
closer to sm play, there are still just way too many of the try to
cover in a short brief of time in an episode like this.

Speaker 3: 49:24 So I'd like to go ahead and move forward now into that first sm
generation. The Essette magazines write quite a bit about the
prewar period. So I'll be returning to it again and again. Before
World War II and even for a time afterward, people who are
interested in bondage were on their own personal accounts tell
us that they searched through bookstores or went to plays or
movies hoping to find scenes of bondage and torment. Some
went to private book sharing clubs or photo clubs looking for
bondage and some made homemade scrapbooks to collect
them and they said they felt isolated and alone in their
interests. Then gradually around 1951 a couple of men's
magazines began to deliberately include erotic scenes of
torment in bondage. Hiromi Sao Tomi Ann sm model and
performer who appeared in the 2007 documentary but Kushi
and who was in the 1986 movie SNM Hunter Co wrote a book
with Domo Kitahara called the people of Catan club where she
says for a number of years after the Second World War, Catan
club was identified as a novelty magazine, abnormal and rear
window interests at surface, little before the war, and despite
the advanced of postwar sexual liberation, the possessed
complex characteristics that were still frowned upon.

Speaker 3: 50:43 Though there were more than a few people who've suffered
from this interest. Catan Club magazine became a place where
these kinds of lonely souls could meet, converse and speak their
minds about the true feelings. They kept hidden at the bottom
of their hearts. Goddamn club was launched in 1947 but there
were many twists and turns in the years leading up to 1954 as it
established itself as that sort of magazine. No doubt the torture
stories, nude women and Kabaka photographs in Catan club
were shocking to people who possessed these secret interests.
Yet at the same time, such people felt a sense of security in the
existence of Catan club because Catan club welcomed reader
submissions. The readers who gathered here sent in stories,
essays, notes, and confessions filled with the years of
 sentiment. Such openhearted submissions were published and
they invited reader responses and it gave the appearance of
being a readers submission magazine.

Speaker 3: 51:38 Many people who later became authors started out as regular
contributing readers of the magazine. Catan club wasn't the
only magazine. Physique is OCI, Naomi, Katie Romance or a
motto and others appeared to be either shifting to sm or being
created as sm magazines themselves and to me the tones in the
magazines seem to reflect their newness. For example, I liked
the defensive innocence in part of one promotional article in
[inaudible] magazine from 1953 and I want to read it for you. It
says four years before the birth of this magazine, abnormal
sexual photo research was diligently pursued in secret, but
happily we recently acquired a number of good looking models,
respectable girls with good stage reviews for special contracts.
So we were able to at last actively begin making works for the
public sadism, Masochism, lesbian ism, sodomy, etc. All fields
were all shrewdly captured while maintaining high character
and since we don't tolerate imitating other magazines, this
magazine has become something unique and it strives to satisfy
your expectations.

Speaker 3: 52:47 By the way, the word abnormal in these quotes is the word they
use sometimes instead of hand tie or perverted and sometimes
you'll see abnormal written with Hentai in little tiny type face as
a reading guide for it. I've seen this time period from the 1950s
to the 1960s referred to as the sm boom, and it seems to be the
time period when all of these isolated people were finally able
to publicly get together and talk about what they were doing. In
a way, these magazines seem to serve as a conduit for this kind
of communication, and the magazines were a mixture of
fictional stories, personal accounts, bonded, seen reports,
historical articles, had a tie guides, articles about the beauty or
excitement of bondage, reviews of bondage in movies and
television and on and on and on, and it didn't stop there. They
also include lots of images from sm around the world.

Speaker 3: 53:40 Personally, I think all of these foreign images or what was being
termed in the magazines as overseas images can lead to
confusion for people who can look at the images but not read
what's being said about them. Someone could easily come away
with an impression that all these American and European
bondage images mean that it must be a source of Japanese
bondage. However, when you read the magazines or if you look
carefully at the pictures, you'll find what the readers of these
magazines were interested in. These foreign images were
spanking, whipping fetish costumes, gags, elaborate bondage,
 devices of wood or metal stockings and female domination.
Early Japanese sm fans. We're certainly interested in all these
things and still are, but when it came to rope bondage, it really
seems to be like they gravitated towards their own style, not
sue fujio expressed it really well in 1953 when he wrote, there
are an overwhelming number of European and American
masochistic pictures where women's bottoms are whipped.

Speaker 3: 54:41 Wouldn't that sort of traditional practice be due to the roots of
their masochism? In that regard, the majority of our own
country's torment art deals with bound women. The system of
comeback who largely used in these circumstances, I'll call it
Japanese style, hands behind provided a kind of sensual feeling
of subjugation for the person being bound. The masochistic
bound persons risks are tied together in Japanese style, hands
behind [inaudible] and the skin of the upper arms is in contact
with the body. One might generally feel a unique central appeal
towards subjugation because of the rope. There's one last
comment I like to make about the SM magazines today and that
is that a lot of the big names of that early generation that are
now pointed to to trace the lineages of some of the current
modern bonds as artists, we're themselves artists. For example,
say ido was a painter and writer co Minnow.

Speaker 3: 55:36 Maura was an illustrator and writer. [inaudible] was a writer.
That's his. Oh, Tsukamoto was a photographer. She and
[inaudible] was a writer. I find it really interesting that it seems
to be artists like these that really set the foundations of the
bondage being done by sm players and all the development and
diversification that's happened over the past 60 years.
Hopefully I've made my case today for how erotic Japanese
bondage developed as best I understand. Modern erotic and
Baku was created out of the personal interest in erotic bondage
and torment. It worked out ways of recreating the old bondage
for the purpose of pleasure and beauty and it developed
pursuing these goals. It wasn't martial artists and policemen
who to take their work and start developing a sexy version of it.
It really was perverts who decided to borrow anything and
everything they can and to rework it into something that they
enjoyed.

Speaker 3: 56:35 Perverted is the heart of erotic. [inaudible]. Sex is at its heart.
Sadomasochism is at its heart. All of the wonderful time we do
today in all the different expressions of erotic Japanese
bondage developed from this source all of the next 60 years
from here. It could be more than a few episodes of their own.
So let's finish up here for today. Images talked about in this
episode are up on the blog at [inaudible] dot com check them
 out and let me know what you think. You can also send any
comments you'd like to come back and now McConn on Twitter
or to the comments section of the blog. Next month, we'll jump
far forward for something contemporary. Thank you for
listening. See you next time.

Speaker 4: 57:16 [inaudible].