Kinbaku goes global

For most of the twentieth century, Japanese rope bondage was something people outside Japan saw, if at all, in imported magazines. Within about two decades, from the mid-1990s on, it became a practice taught in studios and festivals across Europe, North America and Australia. This essay follows that journey and the arguments it started.

Early crossings

Exchange began in print. The artist John Willie published the fetish magazine Bizarre from its first issue in Montreal in December 1945, and his work later appeared in Kitan Club, which made him one of very few Western artists printed there, according to English Wikipedia. The researcher Iris Carmina Ordean, in a Durham doctoral thesis submitted in 2023 on rope scenes in London, Berlin and Paris, notes that Japanese titles such as Kitan Club and Uramado also circulated outside Japan after the war, especially in the United States, and connects them with American fetish publishing of the time.

Collectors abroad kept looking. In a Kinbaku Today roundtable, Marc of BeShibari, a practitioner who runs a rope space in Antwerp, recalls first seeing Japanese rope images in a 1970s magazine and studying underground SM magazines in that decade, with little or no access to moving images.

The 1990s: websites, books and a new word

English Wikipedia’s article on the nawashi says kinbaku has become better known in the West since the mid-1990s. The same Kinbaku Today roundtable points to the internet as the turning point. In 1996 the website kikkou.com was founded by an SM magazine editor and offered English-language information on the Japanese scene; the roundtable credits it with helping spread Japanese kinbaku abroad, and notes that Osada Steve bought the domain in 2001. In Japan itself, Randa Mai published a series of how-to books on kinbaku in 1997, according to the same source.

Early Western authorities did not always get things right. In a 2020 talk at Taiwan’s National Central University, the rope practitioner Shin Nawakiri described one early Western expert, Hans Meijer, as linking shibari to ideas about ki, yin and yang that, he argued, were unknown in Japan’s rope community, and said this influence lasted until around 2000. How “shibari”, an ordinary Japanese word for tying, became the usual Western name is covered in Kinbaku vs shibari.

Books followed. Wikipedia describes Midori’s The Seductive Art of Japanese Bondage (Greenery Press, 2001; some listings give 2002) as the first English-language book to teach Japanese rope bondage. Master K wrote Shibari: The Art of Japanese Bondage and The Beauty of Kinbaku, which Wikipedia’s reading list dates to 2004 and 2008, and the same list includes a 2007 book by Lee Harrington. Master K’s history traveled back the other way: a Japanese translation appeared in 2013 as 緊縛の文化史 (A Cultural History of Kinbaku), according to the National Diet Library catalogue.

Japanese teachers abroad

From the late 1990s, Japanese practitioners began to perform and teach outside Japan. Japanese Wikipedia records a demonstration by Akechi Denki in the Netherlands in 1998. Osada Steve’s published timeline lists performances and teaching in Berlin and Hong Kong in 2004 and a European tour that year, the first annual shibari clinic for North American students in 2007, an Osada-ryū dojo in Berlin from 2008 and yearly European tours from 2009. Hajime Kinoko told AFP in 2025 that he started giving workshops in London about twenty years earlier and later invited other Japanese teachers to show their work to European audiences. Yukimura Haruki, who taught mostly in Japan, gave his first workshop outside the country at the Copenhagen Shibari Dojo in 2012, according to a biography published by Shibari Dojo. Akechi Kanna, who carries the Akechi name, has performed and taught in North America, Australia and Europe since 2014, according to Kanna’s published profile.

The rope researcher Sin, in the Kinbaku Today roundtable, dates the start of a formal, school-like way of teaching technique to around 2005, when a Japanese and a Western practitioner, both with martial-arts backgrounds, began to work this way. He says this approach caught on in the West far more than in Japan, and Ugo, in the second part of the roundtable, notes that dojo-style schools seem to have grown in popularity in the West. Japanese Wikipedia sums up the wider result: workshops and teaching spread through Europe, North America and Australia.

Western scenes find their own voice

As teaching spread, Western scenes built their own institutions. Marc recalls SM bars opening in Belgium around 2000. In Berlin, Felix Ruckert started EURIX, the European Rigger and Model Exchange, in autumn 2012. It meets twice a year, and its own concept text describes combining traditional Japanese shibari with European influences from art, science, psychology, bodywork and sex-positive culture.

Online publishing grew alongside. Ordean quotes the about page of Kinbaku Today, founded in 2014 to bring kinbaku to Western readers through interviews with Japanese bakushi and models, event news and history. She also describes digital archives, usually curated by small teams of editors with long-standing reputations as Japanophiles, that collect, translate and republish material from Japanese magazines for readers who cannot reach the originals.

Authenticity and its critics

Global success raised questions that the scene still argues about. Ordean’s interviews in London, Berlin and Paris found practitioners debating fetishization, cultural appropriation and what counts as “authentic” Japanese rope, and she records introductory talks and workshops presenting hojōjutsu as an origin of rope bondage, a link she says needs more research and which Japanese Wikipedia calls unfounded. Shin Nawakiri’s talk made a related point from Taiwan: he called the master-and-apprentice system a recently invented tradition, described the rise of rope tourism, and argued that an Orientalist view of Japanese rope has been reinforced and used by people in both East and West. He also dated a Western debate over whether “shibari” or “kinbaku” is the correct term to the 2010s.

Japanese scholarship has noticed the same spread. The historian Kawahara Azumi, citing the anthropologist Tanaka Masakazu, writes that kinbaku has spread under the names shibari and kinbaku to Europe, the Americas and Asia, that it has many practitioners, and that these communities give attention to consent and safety, sometimes practicing it in contexts that are not sexual at all. What that worldwide scene looks like today is the subject of the final essay in this series.