Sanshi Funayama (船山三四) was born around the 1920s and is thought to have died around 1999. He is a heavy name in Japanese homoerotic fetish art. His pictures were first published in the early 1960s. He was not already a public erotic artist in the 1920s. In the art history kept by Gengoroh Tagame, Funayama stands with Go Mishima, Tatsuji Okawa, and Go Hirano as a core figure in the first wave of contemporary gay artists in Japan. His subject is the macho male body, pushed into extreme BDSM, torture, and graphic violence. The serious treatment of rope, uniforms, and brutal play became a visual reference for later bara and SM illustration. The bodies in the pictures are adult men.
Fuzokukitan, three decades of silence, two pictures in G-men
The career breaks hard. In the early 1960s he appeared in Fuzokukitan, a fetish magazine that mixed gay material with straight and lesbian material. He later contributed to Bara, a private-circulation gay magazine, and to Barazoku, Japan’s first commercially published gay magazine. From the 1970s through the late 1990s he went silent in public for more than thirty years. Almost no new art was published or passed around. In 1999 he surfaced briefly with two illustrations for G-men and a promise of more. Nothing further came. Given his presumed age, people concluded he had died, and that short return became the last chapter.
The officer who drew on night shift
Very little is known about his private life. He was married, he had a daughter, and he himself worked as a police officer. He drew on night shift and kept the illustrations in his work locker. That double life fits the extreme secrecy of mid-century Japanese gay fetish production. Police officers show up often as figures in the art, folding his own job into an erotic power fantasy. The daughter is a fact of the household. She is not a sexual object in the pictures.
Tagame, a major later gay SM artist, has called Funayama’s work one of the peaks of gay erotic art and counts him as an important predecessor. For a reader tracking Japanese gay male BDSM illustration, Funayama links the early fetish magazines to what came after. Among artists who treat rope and brutal play as a serious craft, he holds a near-mythic place.
