Randa Mai 乱田舞

Randa Mai was a Japanese kinbakushi and director of adult video. English and Japanese Wikipedia give his birth date as March 25, 1959; Nawapedia adds that he was born in Tokyo. English Wikipedia renders his professional name roughly as “wild dancer”.

Career

Nawapedia dates the start of his SM club and rope activity to 1979 and says that from 1986 he began to form his own style of SM. He credited Akechi Denki for that turn: Nawapedia quotes him as saying he would not have become who he was without a show by Akechi he saw in the 1980s. A 2007 interview on the blog Tokyo Bound describes him as self-taught, reports that his first contact with SM was a bondage scene in a manga he saw at the age of ten, and puts his years in bondage at about twenty-five.

Japanese Wikipedia says he worked across video, V-cinema, television, magazines, photobooks and the stage, and credits him with directing or appearing in more than 3,000 video titles. Among his series were Jabaku (Snake Bondage) for the label Attackers and several instructional sets on kinbaku, which Nawapedia dates to 2002 and 2004. He also wrote rope columns for SM magazines in the late 1990s.

Stage and bars

Japanese Wikipedia quotes a collaborator who credited him with pioneering the SM live shows that could later be seen all over Japan. Nawapedia records that he opened the SM bar Ranbukan in Roppongi in 2003, started a kinbaku school in 2005, produced the DX Kabukichō SM show from 2006 and opened Bar Ranbukan, again in Roppongi, in 2016. Both Wikipedias note that he also worked in Europe and the United States.

Approach

According to the Tokyo Bound interview he preferred the label “SM entertainer” to nawashi, and he compared his role to the black-clad kuroko of bunraku puppet theater, who stay in the background so that the woman remains the focus. He said that the person tying is fully responsible for the partner’s physical and mental state, that he must keep listening and communicating throughout, and that care after a session matters because partners can be left emotionally vulnerable. English Wikipedia notes his training in the martial art Shōrinji Kempō, and the interview says he held a fourth dan in it.

Death and succession

Randa Mai died in September 2022. Japanese Wikipedia gives the date as September 14, citing an announcement by his family; Nawapedia gives September 4. His former assistant Aoyama Natsuki took over the name as the second Randa Mai. The kinbakushi Kazami Ranki has named him as an early inspiration.