Kinbiken Tsūshin 緊美研通信

Kinbiken Tsūshin (“Kinbiken Bulletin”) was the periodical of the Kinbaku-bi Kenkyūkai (緊縛美研究会, “Society for the Study of the Beauty of Bondage”), usually shortened to Kinbiken, the group that formed around Nureki Chimuo in the mid-1980s.

The historian Kawahara Azumi describes the background. Gatherings of rope enthusiasts began in October 1985 and took the Kinbiken name at the third meeting in February 1986, after which the group held monthly sessions. The bulletin followed in June 1989 and ran until December 1999, with 23 issues and two later supplementary volumes, published by Fuji Kikaku.

Although it looks like a members’ newsletter, Kawahara notes that it appeared two or three times a year at about 128 pages, cost 2,000 yen throughout, and seems to have been sold in bookshops: readers wrote in to say they had joined after buying a copy. The fourth issue, of April 1990, reported that the meetings had reached their fiftieth session with some 900 attendances in total, most of them men. Kawahara also uses a second, later sheet, an irregular A4 newsletter that Nureki wrote alone between 1999 and 2000 and apparently gave to members, now held by the Fūzoku Shiryōkan library.