Kinbaku in North America

Japanese rope did not arrive in North America to an empty room. The United States already had its own bondage tradition and a pansexual BDSM scene, which a study cited by the sociologist Zoey Jones dates to the 1980s. The story of how kinbaku entered that world, and how it changed it, is mostly a story of teachers, books and events. The earliest exchanges, including John Willie’s magazine Bizarre, Midori’s 2001 book and Osada Steve’s first North American clinic in 2007, are told in Kinbaku goes global.

Two ways of tying

Jones, whose 2020 Carleton University dissertation drew on interviews with rope practitioners in Canada and the United States, found that people in these scenes learn rope in two broad forms: Western rope bondage and shibari or kinbaku. She traces the Western form to American bondage photography and film. Citing a 2007 study by Sisson, she notes that Irving Klaw became famous for photographing the model Bettie Page in rope and for making the first bondage film in 1949, at the end of a network of patrons and producers that went back to the 1930s.

The two forms still sit side by side. When Jones wrote, there was almost no academic account of how they differ, and she points instead to the instruction books, which are written in one style or the other. Shibari-style practice, she adds, is often surrounded by Japanese words and other borrowed customs.

Teachers, books and the first online guides

Classes came first. The duo who call themselves the Two Knotty Boys, Dan and J.D., have given rope classes as a pair since 1999, and their book Two Knotty Boys Showing You the Ropes (Green Candy Press) used more than 750 photographs to show ties step by step; Jones uses their work as an example of the Western-style manual. Online teaching started early too. TheDuchy, a tutorial site, says it was founded in 2000 and calls itself the oldest place online to learn shibari.

Writers then gave Japanese rope an English-language literature. Besides Midori in San Francisco, whose 2001 book is discussed in Kinbaku goes global, Lee Harrington published Shibari You Can Use in 2006, which won a Geoff Mains Book Award from the National Leather Association International in 2008, and edited the anthology Rope, Bondage, and Power in 2009. The London rigger Esinem’s teaching site says he contributed to that anthology, a small sign of how quickly the English-speaking scenes on both sides of the Atlantic began to share teachers and texts.

ShibariCon and the convention model

The best-documented early event is ShibariCon in the Chicago area. In a 2013 episode of his podcast, recorded during that year’s convention, Harrington recalled that the idea grew out of a 2003 BDSM event where a few riggers crowded around the only suspension frame and one of them, who lived in Chicago, proposed a convention with many suspension points. By his account the first ShibariCon in 2004 drew about seventy-five people to a hotel near the city, and later editions drew about eight hundred to the Hyatt Regency. The podcast page itself warns that his memory mixed up details of several years. A blog post from May 2006 shows the convention’s billing at the time: “the largest rope bondage convention in the world”.

Harrington also described ShibariCon as the hub of a rope community that had not existed ten years earlier, and named other rope gatherings around it, among them Ramblewood in Maryland, an Austin rope symposium and the Bondage Rodeo. Teachers came from abroad as well. The Sydney rigger Mark De Viate, trained with Osada Steve in the Akechi Denki tradition, had presented at the Austin rope symposium by 2005 and became a regular educator at ShibariCon, according to his studio’s team page.

The convention model has lasted. Jones describes events where hundreds of people spend the days in classes with several teachers and the evenings at parties, with vendors selling rope and gear. A later example is ROPECRAFT, whose earliest listed edition was held in Austin in February 2016 and which now runs mainly in Chicago, with editions in Austin, New Orleans and San Antonio and online events in 2020 and 2023. It presents itself as a convention for all levels that builds diversity and consent culture into its program.

Canada: rope in public view

Canadian cities put rope in front of general audiences. Jones records two performance events timed to each city’s Nuit Blanche art night: Morpheous’ Bondage Extravaganza in Toronto, which ran for ten years from 2007 to 2016 and is documented in a collection at the University of Toronto, and La Nuit des Cordes in Montreal, then in its fifth year. Both mainly showed shibari-style rope and set strict rules against nudity, sexual expression and visible sadomasochism so that a non-kinky public could watch. Jones notes that no other kind of kink has comparable large, recurring performance events in either country. Kinbaku World’s directories for Toronto and Montreal list the studios and groups active there now.

Performance and self-suspension

Not every American teacher works in a Japanese idiom. The San Francisco teacher Shay Tiziano is known for Western-style, dynamic bondage and for self-suspension, wrote Tying & Flying, which their site calls the first book on self-suspension, and produces the bondage and fetish performance night Twisted Windows. They also co-lead the stages and entertainment of San Francisco’s Folsom Street Fair.

Mexico

Mexico City has its own scene. In 2021 Time Out México profiled ShibaritxsMX, a group founded by Miguel Urueta that gives shibari workshops in the city, including online, and describes itself as mainly LGBTTTI but open to everyone; Urueta framed its work as empowerment through sexual expression. The Mexico City directory lists further groups and recurring jams.

Deference, race and appropriation

North American rope looks to Japan, and that has costs. Jones observes a deference in the United States and Canada to practitioners who are Japanese or who learned from Japanese teachers, along with trappings such as Japanese words and kimono in performance. Several of her participants worried about the over-fetishization and appropriation of Japanese culture and of Asian women in the rope scene. Jones is candid that her own attempt to ask an Asian participant about this went badly, since the participant saw no connection between her background and learning Japanese rope, and she presents that exchange as a lesson in how to interview people about racism.

Jones’s wider findings, that rope scenes reproduce racism, ableism, sexism and other exclusions even as they offer belonging, are summarized in The contemporary scene. One detail from her work shows how scenes and research are shaped: she cites Weekend Reunion, a New Jersey kink convention billed as being like a Black family reunion, as evidence that the low number of Black practitioners in BDSM studies reflects how general scenes and studies are built, not a lack of interest. Newer conventions answer such critiques directly; ROPECRAFT’s program, for example, includes a panel on Asian American women in rope communities.

From a few teachers in the late 1990s, North American rope has grown into a network of conventions, studios, online schools and public performances, linked to teachers in Japan, Europe and Australia, and increasingly willing to argue openly about whom that network serves.