Azumi Kawahara

In 1953, the dispute occurred between the sadist Shin Azuma and the masochist Syozo Numa in a sex culture magazine Kitan Club. The point was whether trousers women wear should be called slacks or zubon. Azuma argued that it must be named not slacks but zubon.
Azuma’s real identity is Nobuhiko Murakami who was historian of fashion and women’s history. He recommended that women wear trousers as a symbol of sexual equality. He rigidly denied the word of ‘slacks’ because it was a name of trouser recently imported from America. He regarded women's wearing trouser as to be firmly established in the society, not as temporary fashion, and considered it to be foreshadowing to tell the arrival of the society with gender equality.
Murakami then proposed the new Japanese sadism. This sadism relies for abusive pleasure much on mental pain, not physical pain, and referred it to the sadism that was modernized. The zubon as a symbol of the women's liberation was defined as the only tool that realized pure sexually abusive relations without imitating existing extre-power relations outside of private spheres.

This article reveals that Murakami Nobuhiko, who was active in fields such as the history of fashion and women’s history from the post-war era to the 1980s, anonymously published numerous theories and novels on sadism in the abnormal sexual culture magazine Kitan Club around 1953~1956. This article aims to reassess Murakami Nobuhiko as a thinker through considering the significance of his anonymous texts. Murakami is known to have argued for the democratic equality of men and women throughout his life, and in his studies on the history of fashion he recommended that women wear trousers as a symbol of sexual equality. These arguments were applied in a sexual way as theoretical foundations for his theories on sadism in the Kitan Club, and they contributed to the "modernization" of sadism as a "mentality of love and peace". His theories on women, fashion and sadism were not contradictory but mutually complementary, so a comprehensive analysis enables us to gain a deeper understanding of Murakami's thoughts. For example, Murakami has been criticized by Fujime Yuki and others regarding his understanding of licensed prostitution and lack of a class approach; but when one takes into account his writings on the relation between the criminal manifestations and social conditions of sadism, it is apparent that he was against the approach that divides women into classes. His work has not been fully understood and surmounted, and it is necessary to reevaluate Murakami's thoughts through a general analysis of his works, including his theories and novels on sadism.

Sadomasochistic sexual desire was one of the significant points of dispute in the feminist sex wars that took place in the United States in the 1970s and ’80s. There were heated debates on whether to consider sadism an imitation of patriarchal dominance and whether masochism could be seen as a concept that affixed passiveness to a woman’s instinct. However, heterosexual sadomasochists in Japan had already been discussing the same issue as early as the 1950s. Sadomasochism became the subject of criticism because of its connotations of “savage” violence against women, and social psychologists during the same period considered it a “savage instinct” that caused wars. As a concept, it was contrasted with democracy. However, in the first half of the 1950s—a time when Japan aimed to democratize and modernize its society and politics following its defeat in World War II—Kitan Club, a magazine that explored perversity and deviant sexuality, justified how this “savage” desire was an extension of democracy and modernization. Their argument is worthy of consideration. In my presentation, I use a historical standpoint to show how sadomasochists in Japan extended democracy as a concept to incorporate their desires. I particularly focus on a specific argument about marital love and a feminist theory developed by a male sadist—both articulated in Kitan Club. Although the male writer used a pseudonym, his real identity as a radical feminist and democratic egalitarian was well known. He formulated his theories about sadism based on his feminism and paid special attention to the problem of relationships between male sadists and normal women. Finally, I show how these arguments have had a strong effect on Japanese S/M culture to this day.