Kinbaku Kenkyū to Tetsugakusha: Kyōdai Kinbaku Shinpojiumu to wa Nan Datta no ka 緊縛研究と哲学者：京大・緊縛シンポジウムとは何だったのか

Kinbaku Kenkyū to Tetsugakusha (“Kinbaku Research and Philosophers: What Was the Kyoto University Kinbaku Symposium?”) is an article by the researcher Kawahara Azumi in volume 4 (March 2022, pages 69–84) of Rinshō Tetsugaku Nyūzuretā, the clinical philosophy newsletter of Osaka University’s Graduate School of Letters. It appeared in a themed section on the ethics of applying philosophy, was funded by a Japanese government research grant, and is open access (DOI 10.18910/86364).

The subject is a symposium on kinbaku and Asian humanities held on 24 October 2020 by a Kyoto University humanities unit, which included a live rope performance. Kawahara recounts that the video drew wide attention, was taken down after a complaint, and was replaced by an apology that set off a public argument about academic freedom and whether kinbaku demeans women.

Her own argument is different. She contends that the problems lay in basic research errors: the speakers had not gathered existing knowledge about kinbaku and treated the topic as uniquely difficult instead of using the established methods of anthropology and sociology. She criticizes an introductory lecture for presenting history as fact while relying, without citation or checking, on the Japanese translation of Master K’s The Beauty of Kinbaku, which she notes is not an academic study. As better starting points she names Tanaka Masakazu’s work on kinbaku abroad, Sakai Hamana’s 2009 study of images of Japan in Western BDSM (which, she notes, surveys Japanese and Western SM culture mainly since the 1980s), and Akita Masami’s history of kinbaku photography. She also argues that the philosophers redefined kinbaku to suit their theories, which she treats as harmful to the people studied.

A postscript notes that the organizer and the lecturers published apologies and corrections in December 2021, which she judges broadly adequate for the factual errors.