Nihon Kinbaku Shashinshi 日本緊縛写真史
Akita Masami's 1996 history of Japanese kinbaku photography, supervised by Nureki Chimuo, which the researcher Kawahara Azumi calls a careful, evidence-based study.
Nihon Kinbaku Shashinshi (“A History of Japanese Kinbaku Photography”) is a book by Akita Masami published in Tokyo by Jiyū Kokuminsha. The National Diet Library catalogue dates it to June 1996 and lists it as volume 1 of the Bibliotheca Nocturna series, 317 pages, with Nureki Chimuo as supervising editor and a separate supervisor for the photographs. The library holds a digitized copy that can be viewed on its premises.
In a footnote to her 2022 article on the Kyoto University kinbaku symposium, the researcher Kawahara Azumi (who cites it with a 1997 date) calls it a good book that follows the history of kinbaku photographs empirically and in detail. She says that research on the history of rope practice itself barely exists, and that this book is valuable precisely because it separates the history of the photographs from the history of the practice and deals only with the former.
Kawahara points to two lessons from the book. First, the distinction between images and practice rules out reading ukiyo-e prints of bound figures, rope practice and postwar magazine photographs as one continuous line. Second, the book records that Japanese kinbaku photographs had already reached Europe and the United States in the 1950s, with some form of exchange, which she considers important for any account of kinbaku’s spread abroad.