Toronawa (Toro, トロ)
Tokyo-based rigger who began learning rope in 2019, studied for three years under Waka at MilkyWay in Gotanda and in 2023 became its first non-Japanese instructor; he runs a weekly salon and performs and exhibits rope photography in Tokyo.
Toronawa, also called Toro, is a rigger, rope teacher and photographer based in Tokyo. His website says he speaks Japanese, Spanish and English and began learning shibari in 2019.
Training at MilkyWay
According to the biography on his site, he spent three years as a student of Waka-sensei. Waka is the owner of MilkyWay, a rope bar in Gotanda, Tokyo, according to the bar’s own website. Toronawa’s site says MilkyWay was founded in 2002, holds classes four days a week and has taught more than two thousand Japanese students. In 2023, the biography says, Toronawa became the first non-Japanese rope instructor at MilkyWay.
Style and teaching
His biography describes his style as drawing on the sensual and dominant approach of MilkyWay. He uses classic shapes and semenawa, but his stated priority is rope that feels good first, with semenawa and aesthetics coming second. According to the site, he builds his suspensions so that they can be held for longer and adjusted easily to different bodies, and that he is known for neon colors and the use of candle wax. On Mondays he teaches at MilkyWay in his own Toronawa Shibari Salon, which the bar’s schedule lists as an evening for foreign guests, and he regularly performs a rope show there.
Performances and exhibitions
His performances page, in a version archived in June 2026, lists a rope performance at Cafe & Bar Ecole, a bar in Ikebukuro with a tatami and bamboo suspension floor, on July 25, 2026. Among past work it records TOKYO LA NUIT, an exhibition he presented with the painter Lidia Núñez at Design Festa Gallery in Harajuku from October 8 to 13, 2025. His contribution, the page says, was a set of photographs taken in Tokyo’s underground nightlife, showing queer people, punks and other outsiders drawn together by rope.