Tatsuji Okawa: Shinjuku Hotel Rooms and First-Wave Gay SM Art

Tatsuji Okawa (大川辰次, 1904–1994) was a Japanese homoerotic fetish artist. Gengoroh Tagame, who writes the history as well as making the art, places him with Go Mishima, Sanshi Funayama, and Go Hirano at the center of the first wave of contemporary gay artists in Japan. For adult readers of gay male BDSM, Okawa is early magazine-era Japanese SM imagery: drawings made in Shinjuku hotel rooms, pages in Fuzokukitan and Barazoku, and a private life kept carefully apart from the pictures.

He lived in the Kanto region with a wife, children, and a white-collar job. The erotic work started in earnest when he was nearly sixty. He was not a young bohemian. He was a late magazine fetish illustrator who rented hotel rooms in Shinjuku, stepped out of family life for the length of a drawing session, and worked in temporary rooms. That switch, between the household and the pictures, is how the work got made.

His first published appearance was a 1964 issue of Fuzokukitan, a fetish magazine that ran gay material next to straight and lesbian material. He later appeared in Barazoku. In the 1970s he stopped illustrating and gave his artist materials to Mamiya Hiroshi, an editor at Fuzokukitan. After Okawa’s death in 1994, the works were acquired by Hiroshi and by Bungaku Itō, founding editor of Barazoku.

Yukio Mishima was a fan and reportedly commissioned Okawa to draw a portrait of Mishima being tortured. That commission puts the illustrator inside literary celebrity and inside gay fetish print at the same time. Private kink, literary self-myth, or both: it is the detail that ties Okawa’s brush most clearly to explicit SM imagery. He stays a quiet elder in that line. Late debut, nearly sixty, Shinjuku hotel production, Fuzokukitan and Barazoku, materials passed to editors, and a Mishima torture picture that still reads as power exchange on paper.