Rune Naito was the pen name of Japanese artist, illustrator, writer, and designer Isao Naito . His illustrations of "large-headed" (nitōshin) baby-faced girls, first drawn for Japanese magazines in the mid-1950s, are credited with pioneering the contemporary culture and aesthetic of kawaii. He is further noted for his contributions to the Japanese gay men's magazine Barazoku, the first commercially circulated gay magazine in Japan.

Barazoku (薔薇族) was Japan's first commercially circulated gay men's magazine. It began publication in July 1971 by Daini Shobō's owner's son and editor Bungaku Itō , although before that, there had been Adonis and Apollo, its extra issue, around 1960 serving as a members-only magazine. Barazoku was Japan's oldest and longest-running monthly magazine for gay men. However, it halted publication three times due to the publisher's financial hardships. In 2008, Itō announced that the 400th issue would be the final one. The title means "the rose tribe" in Japanese, hinted from King Laius' homosexual episodes in Greek mythology. The magazine was printed in Japanese only. Barazoku's Bungaku Itō coined the term for the Japanese lesbian community as which the slang term for lesbian yuri comes from.