Kinbaku in Europe

Europe first saw Japanese rope in imported magazines and then, from the late 1990s, in performances by visiting Japanese teachers. That early phase is told in Kinbaku goes global. This essay looks at what Europeans built for themselves afterwards: an SM publishing culture that took up Japanese rope, a London festival and club scene, schools tied to particular Japanese lineages, rope on dance and opera stages, and the arguments that came with all of it.

A German head start in print and parties

Germany already had an organized SM subculture when Japanese rope arrived. The Hamburg author and publisher Matthias T. J. Grimme co-owns Charon Verlag, a house for BDSM and fetish books, and publishes the SM magazine Schlagzeilen, which German Wikipedia describes as the most widely circulated regular title in that subculture. Until 1998 he helped run the Les Fleurs du Mal parties, which the same article calls the first public SM party series in Germany.

According to German Wikipedia, Grimme has given workshops and performances on BDSM and Japanese bondage since 1998, traveled to Tokyo repeatedly from 2000 to meet Japanese bondage masters, and founded what he calls the “Hamburger Schule”, a playful way of tying inspired by Japanese teachers but without a fixed system. His handbooks for Charon include Das Bondage-Handbuch, which had reached a ninth edition by 2012, and Japan-Bondage (2011). In 2017 he received a lifetime award from BoundCon, a bondage convention in Munich.

London: a festival and a show night

In Britain, press accounts place the start of a Japanese-style scene in the mid-2000s. Dazed reported in 2016 that the Japanese bakushi Arisue Gō performed in London in 2005, in the living room of the rigger Esinem, and called him the first shibari master to perform in the city. Esinem’s teaching site lists his teachers in Japan as Arisue, Osada Steve, Hajime Kinoko, Kazami Ranki and Yukimura Haruki, and names him as a co-organizer of the London Festival of the Art of Japanese Bondage and of BOUND, which a colleague’s biography on the same page calls the UK’s first regular shibari show night.

The festival was an established yearly event by 2011. Its third edition ran over four days that September at the Resistance Gallery in Bethnal Green, presented by Lucha Britannia, with Kazami Ranki, Hajime Kinoko and a performer billed as Ottonawa (Otonawa) among the guests and masterclasses led by Kinoko, according to the ticket listing. The book Kinbaku – The Art of Rope Bondage (2013), co-written by the rigger Nawashi Murakawa, describes him as the artistic director of an annual London festival devoted to Japanese rope.

When Dazed visited in 2016, BOUND was running in a pub in Peckham as London’s leading shibari night, rope jams had spread across the city, and international riggers were performing at fetish club nights. Esinem told the magazine that the British scene was unusually focused on performance, a style he called “aerial tango”, and that its aim had been to push the artistic side. Rope also reached fashion and pop: the article lists Esinem’s work on a 2013 Tom Ford collection and on music videos, and credits the British rigger WykD Dave with tying the singer FKA twigs for her video “Pendulum”.

Teaching spaces followed the performers. Anna Bones and Fred Hatt opened Anatomie Studio in June 2015 as a hub for Japanese-inspired rope. By the studio’s own account it began in their home and a small room in Peckham, where jams drew fifteen to twenty-five people, and moved in June 2018 to a railway arch where thirty to sixty people now come on a jam night. Kinbaku World’s London directory lists the city’s current spaces.

A European festival circuit

By the 2010s European rope had a touring circuit of its own. The Berlin-based teacher Gestalta, who came to rope in 2007, lists appearances at shibari festivals in London from 2009, Sydney in 2013 and 2014, Berlin from 2015, Prague from 2016, Tallinn and Moscow in 2016, and Rome and Helsinki in 2018. Since January 2024 Gestalta has run Daruma, a dedicated rope studio in Berlin.

In Prague, Petr Soptík, who has taught workshops at home and abroad since 2011 and co-founded the studio Subspace, organizes the Prague Shibari Festival, which brings international presenters for workshops and performances; its site currently lists a spring and an autumn edition each year. Berlin’s EURIX exchange, running since 2012, is covered in Kinbaku goes global. These rope festivals sit alongside regular local rope jams, like the London jams described above.

Lineages: the Naka line

Some European schools are organized around named Japanese lineages. One example is the line of Naka Akira, known for a precise, demanding style of semenawa. The Italian rigger Riccardo Wildties is introduced by a school that teaches his system as Naka’s ichiban deshi, his first disciple, and his own Naka-derived system, Kinbaku Luxuria, certifies teachers who run workshops of their own.

The line is strong in France. DocVale writes that he took up Naka’s semenawa in September 2013, opened Atelier Simonet in September 2018 and was authorized by Naka in 2019 to teach his style officially. Alex DirtyVonP trained under Naka from 2013 to 2016, took over the École des Cordes in 2016 and teaches Naka-ryū; his school’s biography also names Wildties and the writer Georg Barkas among his influences, and records a book he co-wrote in 2024, L’Art du Bondage. In Prague, Soptík names Naka and Wildties as the strongest influences on his own style. This chain of teachers, running from Tokyo through Italy into France and central Europe, shows one way that ryū names travel.

Rope on stage and as body work

Europe’s dance and theatre world took up rope early. The Berlin choreographer Dasniya Sommer, who trained in dance in Berlin and New York, has studied and taught shibari since 2006, according to the City of Women festival archive. She has combined it with yoga and ballet in performance, staged rope for Romeo Castellucci’s production of Parsifal at La Monnaie in Brussels, and worked with the choreographer Frances d’Ath on systems for improvising with rope. Her duet Bondage Duell, made with the dancer Silke Schönfleisch, sets classical dance against Japanese bondage techniques to look at bonding, empowerment and constraint; it was first shown at Sophiensæle in Berlin in 2017 and returned there for the Performing Arts Festival Berlin in 2018.

A newer strand treats being tied as a way to study one’s own reactions. In Budapest, Sarkadi Eszter Mirka offers The Healing Art of Shibari, individual sessions that use rope to explore boundaries and consent, control and surrender, and trust. Her page states that the sessions teach no tying technique and are not healthcare or psychotherapy.

What to call it, and whose tradition it is

Europe’s scenes argue about names and origins. In a 2019 article based on fieldwork with practitioners in Hong Kong, London, Paris and Berlin, the researchers Iris Carmina Ordean and Heath Pennington found no agreement on whether rope belongs to BDSM at all: one Paris interviewee said rope with his partner was “not BDSM at all”, while another said the two cannot be separated. They note that EURIX deliberately calls itself a rope bondage event rather than a shibari or kinbaku one so that it can welcome many practices, and they cite Barkas’s warning that ranking names against each other encourages a “nationalism of rope bondage”.

The same authors point out that some practitioners in Europe look to Japanese cultural heritage to give their techniques authority, while the historical case for rope bondage descending from hojōjutsu remains thin and unconfirmed. An earlier study found something similar in Berlin. Summarizing R. J. Martin’s 2011 Princeton dissertation, the sociologist Zoey Jones writes that Berlin practitioners did not actually believe shibari was an ancient martial art, but chose to keep the story because it deepened their experience of Japanese-styled dojo classes, Japanese phrases and customs.

These debates have not slowed the scene down. Europe now has publishers, festivals, full-time schools and teachers with Japanese licenses, and it is still working out how to honor its Japanese sources while doing something of its own.