The Japanese manga artist Shoji Oki (沖 渉二) was born in Sumiyoshi, Hyogo Prefecture, but grew up in Osaka and attended Ichioka High School. He was called up for military service in 1940, and after being discharged from the army in 1945 he enrolled in the design department of the Occupation Forces. He studied oil painting at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, and after leaving college worked as a sign painter, which introduced him to more western styles of art.

Oki’s first illustration commission came in 1951, illustrating a story called ‘Kondo Amatoria’ in the November 1951 issue of the pioneering BDSM magazine Kitan Club, and shortly afterwards he started producing illustrations regularly for One Thousand and One Nights magazine. By the late 1950s his bondage and humiliation illustrations were appearing regularly in specialist magazines and books, including Toshiyasu Sawa’s erotic version of Hans Christian Andersen’s little mermaid, The Mermaid and the Dagger.

Shoji Oki’s work was now well-known in Japanese extreme erotica circles, and a growing number of anthologies reproduced his work, including Whips, Buttocks and a December Wind (Fuzoku Kitan, 1961), The Rope and Woman Picture Collection (Misaki Shobo, 1970), and Flesh Hell (Joy Comics, 1977).

In 2012 Shoji Oki celebrated his ninetieth birthday with a retrospective exhibition of original artwork at Tokyo’s Vanilla Gallery, titled ‘Orgia: A Raucus Party of the Imagination’.

We are very grateful to our Russian friend Yuri for suggesting the inclusion of this artist, and for supplying most of the images.