Kinbaku/Shibari kara kinbaku/shibari e 緊縛/縛りからkinbaku/shibariへ
Anthropologist Tanaka Masakazu's 2014 conference paper to the Japanese Society of Cultural Anthropology on how Japanese rope bondage spread abroad as "kinbaku" and "shibari."
“Kinbaku/Shibari kara kinbaku/shibari e” (“From kinbaku/shibari to kinbaku/shibari”) is a research presentation by Tanaka Masakazu of the Institute for Research in Humanities at Kyoto University. He gave it at the 48th annual meeting of the Japanese Society of Cultural Anthropology in 2014, in a session on Japanese sexual culture going global, and the abstract was published online on J-STAGE on 11 May 2014 (DOI 10.14890/jasca.2014.0_111). The title contrasts the Japanese words, written in kanji, with their romanized forms.
The abstract describes the presentation’s subject as the overseas spread of kinbaku, the Japanese art of rope bondage, which is now taken up around the world under the names kinbaku and shibari. It traces how a practice long regarded in Japan as a traditional sexual practice became global, and it aims to contribute to the anthropology of globalization, the anthropology of sexuality and debates about cultural authenticity. Among its questions is whether kinbaku is really Japanese culture. The keywords are Cool Japan, authenticity, embodiment and pain. The abstract does not set out the evidence or the conclusions.
Tanaka later published a chapter on the theme, “Shibari kara Shibari e: mō hitotsu no Kūru Japan” (From shibari to Shibari: another Cool Japan), in the 2015 Nakanishiya anthology Sekai no Tezawari: Fīrudo Tetsugaku Nyūmon. In a 2022 critique of a 2020 Kyoto University symposium on kinbaku, the researcher Kawahara Azumi lists that chapter, with a 2009 study by Sakai Hamana, as existing work on kinbaku’s recent spread abroad that the speakers should have consulted rather than the non-academic book on kinbaku history they had relied on.