Seiu Ito

Seiu Ito

Ito (伊藤) family name, Seiu (晴雨) first name, (male, 1882-1961)

Activities

Kinbakushi Ito Seiu is the de facto founder of SM in the Showa era (1925 -1989). Born on March 3rd 1882, since his early years he was strongly attracted to the scenes of torture in stories and theatre plays and he produced many works showing photographs or pictures of torture or Kinbaku, using as model his wife or his mistress.

He started as an illustrator working in newspapers at the end of the Meiji era. But he soon distinguished himself as a theater critic, and rose to the position of head of the performing art section and main illustrator for the Yomiuri newspaper. At the beginning of the Taisho period (1912), he met by　chance Sasaki Kaneko (Oha) and Sahara Kise two women who had some understanding of kinbaku and he deepened his study of torture images and torture photography. In the closing years of the Taisho era (1926), he rode the popularity wave of the Eroguro movement and attracted attention as a “painter of perversion”. In 1928 he published the first photo book of kinbaku [Seme no Kenkyu – research on torture], which was immediately forbidden by the authorities.

Before the Second World War, through the editor Suikodo Shoten, he published a large number of collections of graphic works when he was at the height of his art. But this period was unavoidably interrupted by the wartime period. After the war, he was active as a writer in the “Kastori” magazines such as Ningen Tankyu, Kitan Club or Fuzoku Zoshi. In addition, he organized very frequent photo sessions and the resulting photos can be seen as “photos in the Seiu way” in magazines like Fuzoku Zoshi, Fusoku Kitan or Uramado.

During the Taisho period (1912-1926) he had already established theater groups whose plays were centered on torture scenes, and in 1953 he started the “Seme no Gekidan” (the Torture Theater Group) which performed at Ichikawa Suzumoto Theater in Tokyo and other places.

He can be described without exaggeration as the tutelary genius of SM in the Showa (1926-1989) era and his activities as theater artist, performing arts critic, painter of torture scene, kinbakushi are on a scale, which is hard to grasp, while his work as an historian which culminated in his book “Iroha Hiki – Edo to Tokyo Fuzoku Noshi “ about the various tools and crafts of old Tokyo is considered as a masterpiece of the highest caliber.

Alternate Name(s)

伊藤晴雨(Japanese), Hajime Ito (伊藤一, real name)

Biography

1882: Born in Asakusa, Tokyo.

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