Rumi Kasuga: The Queen Of Japanese Sadomasochism
WHO IS RUMI KASUGA
If the United States has Bettie Page as the queen of bondage and sadomasochism, Japan can also take pride in having its own: Rumi Kasuga (春日ルミ). Born in Osaka in 1930, the daughter of an office worker and a shop owner, Rumi Kasuga spent her childhood and adolescence in the surroundings of the city’s red-light district, an experience that would profoundly shape her imagination and her relationship with sexuality. In the postwar period, still in the late 1940s, she discovered a desire for male domination during a relationship with a man four years older than herself, recognizing in this impulse something visceral and instinctive. In the 1950s, when she encountered photographs of women pressing high heels against men’s necks, she noted that “some kind of animal instinct flared up within my body,” revealing the conscious formation of her dominatrix persona. In 1954, Rumi Kasuga came into contact with the magazine Kitan Club, was hired on a monthly basis, and made her debut in the publication in July of the same year. Her bondage work was at times credited as “Design by Rumi Kasuga,” a clear indication of her authorship and aesthetic control. The owner of the bar Bridge in Shinsekai, Osaka, a pioneering space in gay SM, there are indications that private practices of domination were also part of her life beyond the pages of magazines.
Frequently collaborating with figures such as Masako Ibuki and Shōzō Konuma, Rumi Kasuga occupies a singular position in postwar Japanese visual and editorial culture, not as an eccentric phenomenon, but as the expression of a broader process of reconfiguring the female image after 1945, amid foreign occupation, the crisis of traditional values, and the emergence of new cultural circuits oriented toward desires previously confined to secrecy. After a long hiatus, her reappearance in Kitan Club in August 1973 confirms the persistence and relevance of her figure in the history of the Japanese erotic imagination.
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WAR, WOMEN, AND STOCKINGS
Rumi Kasuga occupies a unique place in the history of postwar Japanese visual and editorial culture, especially with regard to the formation of a female image associated with sexual domination. Her emergence in the mid-1950s cannot be understood as an isolated or merely eccentric phenomenon, but rather as part of a broader process of reconfiguring the figure of the Japanese woman after the defeat of 1945, amid foreign occupation, the crisis of traditional values, and the emergence of new cultural circuits oriented toward desires previously relegated to secrecy.
The oft-repeated phrase in postwar Japan, “after the war, women and stockings became stronger,” serves as a starting point for thinking about how these changes occurred. Although today it may sound like a worn-out expression, the phrase condenses a social perception of change: the idea that Japanese women acquired greater autonomy and public presence in the postwar period. However, this simplified reading contrasts with the dominant prewar image of women, associated with the ideal of the Yamato nadeshiko, a figure constructed around docility, emotional restraint, and submission to family and national values. During the period of military mobilization, this ideal was, to some extent, questioned by the figure of the “national defense girl,” symbolically mobilized to serve the war effort, yet still framed within rigidly normative roles.
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Fig.7 Masako Ibuki・Rumi Kasuga - “The Violence of the Demon Woman"
WOMEN AND SEXUAL DOMINATION
In this context, it becomes pertinent to ask about the origins, in Japan, of a female image linked to sexual domination, distinct both from historical queens endowed with political power, such as Himiko (the shaman-queen who ruled the kingdom of Yamataikoku during the Yayoi period, approximately the 3rd century CE), and from mythological or literary figures of authority. The notion of a “queen” in the SM sense, a woman whose strength manifests itself through the erotic exercise of control over another, finds no clear precedents in Japanese visual culture prior to the war. Even if individual fantasies may have existed, they found no space for representation either in social life or in the performing or graphic arts. The simple image of a Yamato nadeshiko whipping a man would have seemed inconceivable in early twentieth-century Japan.
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In the extended Premium version of this publication and discover the exciting stories behind the additional paragraphs:
- THE EMERGENCE OF THE QUEEN OF SADOMASOCHISM,
- SADOMASOCHISM AND DOMESTIC SETTINGS,
- THE AESTHETICS OF HER SADISM,
- THE IMPORTANCE OF RUMI KASUGA,
- REFERENCES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS,
- 80 PICS OF HER AROUSING SM (ALSO RARE ENEMA SCENES
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