Shin Nawakiri 小林繩霧

Shin Nawakiri, who also writes as 小林繩霧, is a kinbaku performer, teacher and writer. His publisher’s author note describes him as an international kinbaku performance artist who has taught in Macao, Taipei, Moscow, London and elsewhere, and as a public advocate for BDSM rights in Taiwan. His name appears in two romanizations: one bookseller record lists the author as Shin Nawakari, while the book’s description and his university lecture use Nawakiri.

Essence of Shibari

His book Essence of Shibari: Kinbaku and Japanese Rope Bondage was published by Mystic Productions Press on May 1, 2017, with photographs by the Taiwan-based photographer Piez Jeng. The 138-page book, as its description presents it, offers ties for beginners and techniques for intermediate and advanced practitioners, from body wrapping without knots and single-column ties to body harnesses, the futomomo and the takate kote, and also covers the history of kinbaku and the psychology of bondage for both partners.

Writing on rope history

He contributes to 縛.生 (Shibaru.life), a Chinese-language site about rope bondage that publishes news, interviews, history, technique and opinion and announces workshops and lectures in Taiwan; a 2023 opinion piece there by him discusses how BDSM is portrayed in Copycat Killer, which the piece identifies as a 2023 Taiwanese Netflix drama.

On November 25, 2020, he gave a lecture titled “The Orientalist Gaze on Japanese Rope Bondage” at National Central University in Taiwan, listed under his Shibaru.life affiliation. Its abstract argued that the early Western authority Hans Meijer had linked shibari to Eastern philosophy and to the myth of “Chinese water torture” in claims unknown in Japan’s rope community, yet influential until about 2000. It also described a Western debate in the 2010s over whether “shibari” or “kinbaku” is the right term, called the master-and-apprentice model a recently invented tradition, and said that rope tourism had become common. A 2021 report on the talk by the International Center for Cultural Studies at National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University adds that he drew on Edward Said’s idea of Orientalism, dated the age of rope tourism to around 2010, discussed self-orientalism, and argued that labeling a practice real or fake is itself an early step toward an Orientalist view.