Go Mishima: Tattooed Macho Men, Sabu, and Japan’s First Gay SM Art

Tsuyoshi Yoshida (1924–1988), pen name Go Mishima (三島剛), is a central figure in Japan’s first wave of contemporary gay art, and the founder of the magazine Sabu. Artist and historian Gengoroh Tagame groups him with Tatsuji Okawa, Sanshi Funayama, and Go Hirano. His drawings are part of the ground under Japanese gay male BDSM and muscle-fetish imagery, and that look later fed global leather aesthetics. The men he drew are the “macho” type: crew cuts, full-body yakuza-style irezumi. Masculine submission and tattooed power are what the pictures keep in view. These are adult erotic images, not a how-to.

He was born in Yokosuka, Kanagawa Prefecture. At eighteen he was drafted into the Imperial Japanese Army, and his first homosexual relationship happened while he was in the service. After the Second World War ended in 1945 he moved to Tokyo and into the city’s gay nightlife. Many bars and clubs then were run by yakuza. That scene deepened his fixation on crew cuts and fully tattooed men, and those became the center of the work. In the late 1950s he came across the Finnish artist Tom of Finland, and the influence shows in the drawings.

In 1955, at a gym, he met the writer Yukio Mishima. They got close over athletics, bodybuilding, and hypermasculine sex, and they drew nudes together for fun. With Yukio’s encouragement he started taking homoerotic art seriously, and he took “Mishima” as a pen name in tribute. After Yukio Mishima’s death by ritual suicide, Go’s pictures turned more violent. Bondage, masochism, and torture came into the frame more strongly. The point of those pictures is adult erotic atmosphere, not a set of instructions.

In print, he was already in Fuzokukitan and Bara in 1964, early magazines that ran gay material and gay pornography, and he was an early contributor to Barazoku. In 1971 Barazoku became Japan’s first commercially circulated gay magazine. He disliked the pretty-boy bishōnen style then in fashion, so in 1974 he founded Sabu. The magazine centered masculine men and more explicit pornography: muscle, the charge of leather, and a hardness next to SM, rather than soft romance.

Go Mishima died on 5 January 1988 from complications of cirrhosis. Sadao Hasegawa called him “a master illustrator of the male physique.” In 1989 Barazoku published a commemorative issue. In 1999 Gallery Naruyama in Tokyo gave him his first solo exhibition. He stands where army experience, yakuza visual codes, Tom of Finland, and postwar Japanese gay print culture meet.