Hajime Kinoko

Hajime Kinoko is a Tokyo rope artist and photographer who leads the rope school Ichinawakai. His official profile presents his aim as turning kinbaku into an art form and sharing its appeal with a wider public, and names the photographers Sugiura Norio and Araki Nobuyoshi as influences.

Learning rope

According to his profile, Kinoko started tying in 2001 and was largely self-taught, with guidance from a rope practitioner named Yumeko whom he later called his shishō. Around 2003, while managing a fetish bar, he attended workshops by Akechi Denki. In 2008 he began lessons with Kanna, a former student of Akechi Denki, and some years later studied with Yukimura Haruki for several years. In 2018 he named Kanna and Yukimura as his onshi, the teachers to whom he owes gratitude. From 2009 he assisted at Sugiura Norio’s photo shoots and later became their main rigger. AFP, reporting in 2025, dates his discovery of rope to the 2000s, when he ran an SM venue in Roppongi.

Ichinawakai

Kinoko founded Ichinawakai and still runs it; his profile dates the founding to 2006, the year he began performing under the name Hajime Kinoko, while the school’s lesson page gives 2004. The school has a graded curriculum from 10th grade upward, with an examination at each level, and a weekly Tuesday group class in Tokyo. Its instructor licenses can be issued only by Kinoko and must be renewed every two years; the lesson page lists chapters in Sapporo, Fukuoka and Kumamoto and abroad in Seoul and Perth. Kinoko told AFP that he began teaching after seeing people tie others without knowing what they were doing, because rope can be dangerous, and that about 40 percent of his students are women.

Performance and art

His profile dates his first workshops and shows abroad to 2010 and says he has taught in more than twenty cities, among them Paris, London and Munich; it lists a 2024 European tour through London, Stockholm, Paris, Berlin and Rome and a US tour that December. In 2018 A Hotel Life reported a performance by him at the Museum of Sex in New York. His profile lists performances at the Fuji Rock Festival in 2009 and 2019, rope installations for fashion and art events in Tokyo, and solo exhibitions from 2010 onward, including The Marrow of Ropes at the Akio Nagasawa Gallery in 2024. He has supplied rope work for music videos and fashion shoots and has published photobooks since Beni Tengu in 2014.

His Red series, the profile says, treats rope as connection rather than capture, standing for bonds such as family, ancestry and fate. Speaking to AFP, he compared tying people, objects or spaces to painting on a canvas, and described kinbaku as the precise, restrictive end of rope work within the looser, broader term shibari.