CineMagic (シネマジック) was founded on 11 November 1983. Shoichi Yoshimura had edited SM magazines at Sun Publishing (サン出版), and in college he had been in a film-studies club. He was fixed on the SM novelist Oniroku Dan, and he started the company to adapt Dan’s erotic fiction with the finish of a film. At the start the whole staff was about five people, and those five did the shooting and the publicity themselves. The name joins cinema and magic — magic in the sense of something you did not see coming — and the aim was to put an SM world on screen with that kind of pull. The debut, shot the same year in a love hotel in Shinjuku Kabukicho, was S&M Live Shot: Ecstasy Bondage! Love Slave A. In 1985 the company joined the Japan Video Ethics Association (Videorin).
What separated CineMagic from the other tape labels was the jacket, and then the story. In 1985 D-CUP Beauty: Sister L, starring Eri Kikuchi, hit and became a series. The packages were elegant, and they broke the standing image of SM video as something dark and filthy. From there the house stayed on what the trade calls the royal road of SM: a plotted training drama, shot to look like a film. Art Video, working at the same time, stayed documentary, bare concrete, no polish. CineMagic spends the running time on why this is happening and on what the woman is thinking. The women are composed on purpose — a teacher, a nun, a wife — and the film walks them, step by step, into a fall they end up accepting. Light is soft, shadow is placed, clothes have texture.
Once that reputation was in place, the company hired women who did not need an SM label, and then it stepped into ordinary theaters. In 1990 the Slave Secretary series broke the habit of casting unknowns. Hitomi Kobayashi, Yoko Yazawa, and Akira Watase, mainstream names, played the masochist inside a story that could hold them. In 2000 CineMagic put an Oniroku Dan original on a cinema screen: Season of Infidelity (不貞の季節), directed by Ryuichi Hiroki and starring Ren Osugi. In 2002 it led O-Yo, released through Shochiku theaters, directed by Ikuo Sekimoto, with Naoto Takenaka and Tetsuya Kumakawa. Filmgoers who never bought an SM tape heard the name.
Collect, Jō, Noir, and the smaller lines
Before 2000 the main name on the box was CineMagic. In 2000 the company opened Collect — the word used in the sense of collecting slaves — as the core drama line. Slave Female Teacher (奴隷女教師) and the Infidelity series (不貞) are the ones cited: full training stories. Jō (縄, rope) was set up under the late rope master and director Haruki Yukimura, for hemp-rope work and for suspension treated as force and as a picture. The tying on that line sat under the studio’s rope masters. Noir, French for black, is the dark documentary line: amateur-style training, enemas, excretion, the heavier tastes. Around those sit Kanjuku (完熟, mature-woman SM), Lilies (lesbian SM, no men), Gang (group sex and party tapes), In’yō (陰陽, trans performers and otokonoko), and Vixen, Makoto Maruhashi’s teasing, playful line.
The business side moved more than once. In 2006 review of the work shifted to the Content Soft Cooperative (CSA, Medirin). From 2007 national distribution went to Out-Vision, under the Hokuto group. In 2015 CineMagic opened its own studio building in Nakano, Tokyo. That same year founder Shoichi Yoshimura died. Shinichi Kawamura had already been the resident director for more than twenty years. Rope supervision over the long run came from the late Haruki Yukimura and from masters including Chimuo Nureki and Go Arisue.
After the cut, every unused uncensored NG take is physically destroyed. That is the leak rule, and it is how the finished disc stays inside the mosaic requirement. Minors are not cast. Where a tape uses a school uniform, a campus, or age play, the performers are adults acting a part.
