Midori

Midori is a sexuality educator, author, artist and speaker based in San Francisco. Her biography at Fire Horse Productions, the company through which she teaches, says her career began in the early 1990s within San Francisco’s sex-positive movement and that she soon became an international presenter on sexuality, personal fulfillment and kink. English Wikipedia, drawing on her own published biographies, records that she was born in Kyoto and grew up in Tokyo before moving to the United States.

The Seductive Art of Japanese Bondage

Her best-known rope work is The Seductive Art of Japanese Bondage, published by Greenery Press with photographs by Craig Morey, as a library catalog record credits him; a bookseller listing gives January 2001 as the publication date, while Wikipedia’s bibliography lists it under 2002. Wikipedia describes it as the first English-language book to teach Japanese rope bondage. A 2003 profile in the Toronto magazine Xtra reported that the first printing sold out within ten months. The same profile traced her interest in rope back to childhood in Japan, then followed her from experimenting with rope in college to bottoming for intensive rope bondage within San Francisco’s SM community, and quoted her ambition to make rope tying an art form comparable to flower arrangement.

Teaching

In the early 2000s, Xtra reported, she was already teaching introductory workshops on Japanese rope bondage, and she was due to return to Toronto to teach rope bondage in a safer-SM program run by the AIDS Committee of Toronto. Today she leads Rope Dojo, a small-group, in-person weekend intensive taught with a team of other teachers; her site listed it as postponed during the COVID-19 pandemic. She calls her teaching method “head-heart-hands”, an approach meant to leave room for each participant’s own exploration. Her listed presentations include AASECT, Stanford and San Francisco State University, the Museum of Sex in New York, Folsom Street and Ropecraft, and she was instructor in residence at Boundless in 2023. Her biography also names her as a co-founder of the Sexual Health Alliance’s Kink Informed Certification Program; Wikipedia describes her role as working with the alliance on it in 2021.

Her other books include Wild Side Sex (2005), a guide to foot and shoe worship (2005) and the fiction collection Master Han’s Daughter (2006). Her art and performance work is presented at Ranshin.com. Honors listed in her biography include the AASECT Humanitarian Award in 2022 and induction into the Society of Janus Hall of Fame in 2019.