JOHN WILLIE: A BIZARRE LIFE

Something I’d been entirely unaware of until reading Jane’s Kitan Club chapter was the cross-fertilisation of bondage cultures that occurred between John Willie and Japan. This interplay, claims the author, changed both Western and Japanese bondage forever.

The magazine Kitan Club (Strange Tales Club) was launched in Japan in 1947 under the editorship of Minori Yoshida, with art by Toshiyuki Suma. Bondage and SM had become its exclusive focus by 1952, and in 1953, Suma left to set up his own rival magazine, Uramado (Rear Window).

THIS SHOT from Willie’s LA years, again of Pat Conley, shows a strappado tie also found in Japan’s bondage culture (photo c/o Bélier Press)

In 1953 Willie became the first Western artist to be featured in Kitan Club

“I was very excited to write about Kitan Club,” Jane reveals, “because I’m a big fan of the magazine, and not much has been published about it in English. (I recommend the book The Beauty of Kinbaku by Master ‘K’ to readers interested in learning more about the history of Japanese bondage generally.)

“My mother is from Japan and I also lived there for a time, so when I learned that John Willie had a connection to Japan, I was thrilled!

“Japanese bondage is quite different from American bondage, and has a long history as both an erotic tool and as a means of punishment and torture.

“What is less well-known is that John Willie was instrumental in bringing Japanese bondage style to the West, while his artwork helped to introduce American bondage style to Japan.

“I explore this fascinating exchange in the book and also share the stories of some major early- and mid-20^th century Japanese bondage artists.”

I tell Jane that, again as a result of my job as a music journo, I had travelled for the first time in the late 1970s to Tokyo, where on regular newsstands I was amazed to discover pocket-sized SM magazines.

There were also beautifully printed monographs featuring full-colour artistic bondage images of incredible technical quality — my introduction to shibari.

Much later, when shibari performances began to be featured regularly by fetish clubs in London and beyond, they were at first a novelty and a big attraction. But the more

John Willie’s final, but uncompleted, cartoon project was Sir D’Arcy & The Wasp Women. By early 1961 he’d started having health problems which would lead, sadly, to a brain tumour diagnosis. He flew to London for treatment, but on returning to LA, received a cancer diagnosis.

Announcing news of the closure of his business on June 12 1961, he destroyed all his negatives and his mailing list, and moved to Guernsey where his sister lived. He died in his sleep on August 5 1962, aged 59.

“The destruction of the mailing list was a very deliberate decision to protect the identities of his fans and customers,” Jane tells me. “Many times over the course of his life he was offered money for the list, which he never sold — this is another example of the integrity that was always at his core, both professionally and creatively.

“Just like email lists now, it was extremely common in John Willie’s day for fetish purveyors to sell their mailing lists, and unknowing customers would then be bombarded with mail from other (often disreputable) companies.

“As a researcher, though, I certainly wish I could have seen his list. It would be interesting to see the geographical distribution of customers and, possibly, details such as the age and sex of his readership.

“He did pass on a collection of his original artwork to a friend, and some of it can now be found in the archives of the Kinsey Institute. There are also, of course, some original works in private hands.

“I do find the destruction of his negatives to be very sad, and he expressed some regret about it shortly before his death.”