Naka Akira 奈加あきら
Japanese kinbakushi and adult-video director, born 1959, who trained under Nureki Chimuo at the Kinbiken and developed the precise semenawa style known as Naka-ryū.
Naka Akira is a Japanese kinbakushi who also works as a director in adult video. His official profile gives his birth year as 1959; Nawapedia and the infobox of French Wikipedia place his birth in Niigata Prefecture. The profile calls the way of tying he developed Naka-ryū and notes that audiences abroad know it as the Naka style.
Training with Nureki Chimuo
Naka came to rope through the adult-video business. In a 2015 interview with i-D he recalled that, at around thirty and running a company that made such videos, he went to a shoot where a model was to be tied and watched Nureki Chimuo do the tying. Nawapedia dates that first encounter to 1990. His official profile says that in his early thirties he encountered the Kinbiken, Nureki’s study group, was drawn at once to bondage with hemp rope and quickly joined its circle; Nawapedia puts his time there at about five years. In the i-D interview he described learning as an assistant, from caring for the rope to preparing it, and said about two years passed before he was allowed to untie a model himself. Nawapedia adds that Nureki gave him his professional name and lists the photographer Sugiura Norio as a second master.
His profile describes him as carrying on Nureki’s style while making its rope work denser and more meticulous, until it became a style of his own. It quotes Muryū ZOU’s label for the result, aesthetic semenawa kinbaku.
Video and photography
According to his profile, Naka worked with the Cinemagic label, with the director TOHJIRO on the Dogma label, and with Muryū ZOU on the Nawa-etsu series for an art label. In March 2008 he and Muryū ZOU founded a kinbaku fan club in his name. From 2009, the profile says, he was the main rope artist for Sugiura Norio’s photo shoots. Nawapedia lists further video and book work, including how-to titles from 2011, a photo collection in 2012 and VR productions in 2020, and records that he started the Nawa Naka Kai event series in Tokyo in 2011.
Performance and teaching abroad
His profile says that since 2013 he has given live performances abroad, in Russia, the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, the United States, Italy and France. Nawapedia lists workshops or shows in Moscow, London, Berlin, Los Angeles, Madrid, New York, Paris and other cities between 2013 and 2019, and records several students he named as apprentices from 2015 onward. The i-D article was written after a performance in a Brooklyn warehouse.
Shibari Dojo describes his teaching as mostly by observation, with corrections reserved for anything unsafe, and quotes his principle that “the rope is free”: semenawa should adapt to the body rather than follow a fixed sequence. It also notes that he ties with hemp rope and bamboo and avoids metal hardware. In the i-D interview Naka said his rope might have been influenced by hojōjutsu, the restraint art shaped in the Edo period, but that kinbaku is something entirely different, and he located its beauty in mutual understanding and trust between the partners.