The contemporary scene

Speaking in 2020, the rope practitioner Shin Nawakiri said that shibari and kinbaku had become known worldwide only over the previous decade. This final essay looks at that recent period: who teaches and where, how people learn, what changed during the pandemic, and the questions about safety and consent that have come to define the scene. It is a snapshot rather than a verdict, and much of it is still moving.

A generation passes in Japan

The 2000s and 2010s saw the deaths of several figures who had shaped kinbaku since the magazine era: Akechi Denki in 2005, according to Japanese Wikipedia, Iida Toyoichi (Nureki Chimuo) in 2013, as the historian Kawahara Azumi records, and Yukimura Haruki in 2016, according to a biography published by Shibari Dojo. Their names live on in schools and lineages. Akechi Kanna, who trained with Akechi Denki from 2000, took over the Akechi name in 2022 and now leads a school in that line, according to Kanna’s published profile.

In Tokyo, Hajime Kinoko represents a newer approach. In a 2025 AFP interview he compared tying people, objects and spaces to painting on a canvas, and said he does not place himself in a hierarchy with the people he ties. He has made rope installations in public, including a house in Shibuya wrapped in blue rope, large rope cubes on top of a Tokyo shopping mall in 2017 and a “shibari sanctuary” at the Burning Man festival in the United States the same year. His school, Ichinawakai, trains a new generation; AFP reported that about forty percent of its students are women and that its in-house certification, earned through a ten-stage course, is not an official license.

Japan’s amateur scene grew too. A Kinbaku Today roundtable describes rope gatherings, known as nawakai, multiplying in the big cities in the 2000s, and an event called Chika-shitsu holding its first meeting in 2010. Kinbaku also reached the Japanese mainstream: a 2012 feature in ITmedia’s Nlab noted a run of works on the theme, among them the film Jijo Jibaku no Watashi, adapted from a novel that won a literary prize for women writers and due for release in 2013.

Dedicated spaces abroad

Outside Japan, rope moved from general kink clubs into spaces built around it. Iris Carmina Ordean’s doctoral fieldwork in London, Berlin and Paris, which ran until early 2019, describes the largest tying space in London opening in June 2015 and moving to larger premises in 2018, a large Paris venue that hosted teachers from around the world, and a week-long festival held twice a year in Berlin. She found that these spaces each have their own house rules but invite international teachers and draw visitors from many countries, so that practitioners regularly travel for workshops, festivals and to tie with friends.

The festival model has proved durable. EURIX in Berlin has met each spring and autumn since 2012, with workshops, research groups, talks and evening jams, and states consent, empathy, diversity and inclusion among its values. Kinbaku World’s places and events directories track studios, classes and recurring events in many cities.

Learning online

Instruction moved online alongside the in-person scene. Rope365, a publicly accessible online project written by Ebi McKnotty, breaks rope bondage into small building blocks and is organized in four seasonal sections. Shibari Study, founded in 2019, offers subscription video courses for all levels; PAPER presented it in 2021 as one of the places making rope easier to learn. Ordean found that rope manuals circulate widely among teachers in Western scenes and that most include technical instruction together with safety, consent and negotiation, and aftercare.

Social media changed how the scene presents itself. One studio founder told Ordean that so many people now post rope photographs on Instagram that the studio mostly reposts its visitors’ pictures instead of producing its own. At the same time, the Kinbaku Today roundtable notes that platform censorship and bans on nudity have become a constraint for rope artists online.

The pandemic

COVID-19 interrupted all of this. EURIX cancelled its spring editions in 2020 and 2021. Osada Steve’s published timeline records a move to virtual workshops and private online coaching in 2020 and the launch of a tutorial website in 2021. Writing in December 2020, the rope researcher Sin told Kinbaku Today that the pandemic had halted underground event work.

Safety becomes a research subject

As the number of practitioners grew, so did attention to injuries. In 2023 a research team based mainly in Belarus, writing in the journal Cureus, reported ten people with sixteen nerve injuries after full suspension. The radial nerve in the upper arm was the most affected, involved in nine of the ten cases. The authors called for anatomy and safety training for practitioners, open communication during sessions and further research toward agreed safety guidelines, while stressing that their small sample cannot be generalized. Kinbaku World’s safety section collects this kind of guidance.

The scene’s growth has also brought its conflicts into view. Ordean describes how the Paris venue she studied closed in May 2018 after its owner was publicly accused of abuse and repeated consent violations, and how online platforms are sometimes used to report such violations. In North America, the sociologist Zoey Jones, in a 2020 Carleton University dissertation based on twenty-three interviews in Canada and the United States, describes rope bondage as a social world of its own that gives many people pleasure and belonging, but that also reproduces racism, ableism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia and classism, with disabled and racialized practitioners central to her account of both oppression and resistance.

A field of study

Rope is now studied in universities as well as dojos. Besides the dissertations by Jones and Ordean, Kawahara, an associate professor at Fukuoka Women’s University, has published SM no Shisōshi (“An intellectual history of SM”, 2024), a study of 1950s Japanese magazines including Kitan Club and of how their writers thought about subjectivity, consent and love. Kawahara also notes, citing the anthropologist Tanaka Masakazu, that the communities practicing shibari and kinbaku around the world pay attention to consent and safety, and that rope is sometimes enjoyed in contexts that are not sexual at all.

The scene these essays end with is international, documented online and studied in universities, and it still looks to Japan while writing its own history.