Tsuyoshi Yoshida (1924 – 5 January 1988), known by the pen name Go Mishima (三島剛), was a Japanese homoerotic fetish artist and founder of the magazine Sabu. He is noted for illustrations of “macho-type” men, often wearing yakuza-inspired irezumi tattoos. Artist and historian Gengoroh Tagame groups Mishima with Tatsuji Okawa, Sanshi Funayama, and Go Hirano as a central figure in the first wave of contemporary gay artists in Japan—foundational for gay male BDSM and muscle fetish imagery that still feeds global leather aesthetics.
Biography
Mishima was born in 1924 in Yokosuka, Kanagawa Prefecture. At eighteen he was drafted into the Imperial Japanese Army and had his first homosexual experience with his commanding officer. After World War II ended in 1945 he moved to Tokyo and entered the city’s early gay nightlife. Many bars and clubs of that era were yakuza-run; Mishima’s fascination with crew-cut hairstyles and full-body tattoos became central to his art.
In the late 1950s he discovered Tom of Finland, who influenced his work. In 1955 he met writer Yukio Mishima at a gym; they bonded over athletics, bodybuilding, and hypermasculine sexuality, drawing nudes together as a pastime. With Yukio’s encouragement Go pursued homoerotic art seriously and adopted the Mishima surname as pen name in tribute. After Yukio Mishima’s death by ritual suicide, Go’s art turned more violent—bondage, masochism, and torture entered the frame more strongly.
Magazines: Fuzokukitan, Barazoku, and Sabu
In 1964 Mishima appeared in Fuzokukitan and Bara, among Japan’s earliest magazines with gay and gay pornographic content. He was an early contributor to Barazoku, which in 1971 became Japan’s first commercially circulated gay magazine. Dissatisfied with Barazoku’s bishōnen (beautiful-boy) art style, he founded Sabu in 1974 to center masculine men and more explicit pornography—muscle, leather energy, and SM-adjacent toughness rather than soft pretty-boy romance.
Death and Legacy
Mishima died on 5 January 1988 from complications of cirrhosis. A 1989 commemorative issue of Barazoku honored him; Sadao Hasegawa called him “a master illustrator of the male physique.” His first solo exhibition opened in 1999 at Gallery Naruyama in Tokyo. For kink and gay SM history, Go Mishima stands where military, yakuza visual codes, Tom of Finland influence, and post-war Japanese gay print culture meet—an artist who made masculine submission and tattooed power objects of sustained erotic study. Related topics: gay male BDSM art, Tagame’s historical canon, Sabu magazine, and Japanese homoerotic illustration.
