Tatsuji Okawa (大川辰次, 1904–1994) was a Japanese homoerotic fetish artist. Alongside Go Mishima, Sanshi Funayama, and Go Hirano, he is regarded by artist-historian Gengoroh Tagame as a central figure in the first wave of contemporary gay artists in Japan. For gay male BDSM readers, Okawa is early magazine-era Japanese SM imagery: Shinjuku hotel drawing sessions, Fuzokukitan and Barazoku pages, and a private life carefully split from the art.
Double Life: Kanto Salaryman and Shinjuku Fetish Drawer
Okawa lived in the Kanto region with a wife, children, and a white-collar job. He rented hotel rooms in Shinjuku to draw. His erotic career began in earnest when he was nearly sixty—not as a young bohemian, but as a late-blooming magazine fetish illustrator working in temporary rooms away from family life.
Magazines, Retirement, and the Archive Trail
He first appeared in a 1964 issue of Fuzokukitan, a fetish magazine that published gay content alongside straight and lesbian material. He later appeared in Barazoku. Okawa quit illustration in the 1970s and gave his artist materials to Mamiya Hiroshi, an editor at Fuzokukitan. Upon his death in 1994, his works were acquired by Hiroshi and Bungaku Itō, founding editor of Barazoku.
Yukio Mishima and the Torture Portrait
Writer Yukio Mishima was a fan of Okawa’s and reportedly commissioned him to draw a portrait of Mishima being tortured—placing Okawa inside literary celebrity as well as gay fetish print. Whether private kink, literary self-myth, or both, the commission is the detail that most clearly ties Okawa’s brush to explicit SM imagery.
For bdsmwild readers, Okawa is first-wave Japanese gay BDSM art infrastructure: Tagame’s founder canon, late magazine debut at nearly sixty, Shinjuku hotel production, Fuzokukitan and Barazoku publication, materials passed to editors, and a Mishima torture commission that still reads as pure power-exchange fantasy on paper. He remains a quiet elder of the lineage—central to how Japanese gay fetish illustration is told.
