Shigonawa Bingo 紫護縄びんご

Shigonawa Bingo (紫護縄びんご), also written Bingo Shigonawa and Shigonawabingo, was a Tokyo kinbakushi who ran rope bars in Kabukichō, Shinjuku, taught a regular workshop course and appeared at rope events in Japan and abroad. Nawapedia records that Shigonawa Bingo died in November 2025, and the official website refers to the late (故) Shigonawa Bingo. The official site now opens with a note of thanks on behalf of the late Shigonawa Bingo and says that the site, which sets out the artist’s philosophy, will stay online unchanged for a while.

Bars and teaching

The official career page records that Bingo opened UBU in Shinjuku with Yoshida Yoi on February 2, 2011, held the Ubu-nawa course there in 2012, opened the sister bar mitsu on December 25, 2013, and opened Shigonawa Salon on October 21, 2022, for meetings and classes; another official-site passage gives the bar opening years as 2012 and 2014. The official site also offered private lessons in all of Bingo’s tying, some needing a model and some not, with the model either arranged through the site or brought by the student, booked from two hours.

In a 2015 interview with Kinbaku Today, Bingo set out how the UBU workshops ran. Every newcomer, however experienced, began with a classroom lecture in which nobody handled rope: the basic ideas of kinbaku, ways to lower the risk of injury, and communication between the person tying and the person tied. Students then practiced knots on their own bodies, including hon-musubi and maru-musubi, before learning to position a partner’s arms and tie the wrists for the gote without adding pressure. In Bingo’s view no one could manage with fewer than two sessions, the lecture included. Later stages covered suspension (kake), restraint (tome), tension, rope handling and conduct (shosa), and for advanced students decorative rope, suspension rope, semenawa and dōnyū, the means of drawing a partner’s attention into the scene. Bingo said this teaching served private rope rather than shows or photography, and that a personal style can only grow from understanding a form, not from copying it.

Performance and exhibitions

The official career page records Bingo’s debut at Onawa Asobi at Good-studio on June 19, 2009, and later appearances in Tokyo and Osaka. The official career page records participation in a London kinbaku festival in September 2011, workshops and performances at Place des Cordes in Paris in 2015, 2017 and 2018, and lists events in Australia in 2013 and Taipei in 2023 and 2024. The official career page lists a three-artist exhibition at Shinjukuza in November 2012 and another exhibition there in February 2015.