United States

Japanese rope reached a country that already had organized BDSM and a bondage tradition of its own. The Eulenspiegel Society, founded in New York in 1971, is described as the first BDSM organization in the United States, and the sociologist Zoey Jones traces Western-style rope bondage to American bondage photography and film, including Irving Klaw’s first bondage film of 1949. How kinbaku entered that world is told in Kinbaku in North America; this page gives the national outline and points to the city guides.

Classes, books and websites

English-language teaching took shape around 2000. The duo known as the Two Knotty Boys began teaching rope together in 1999, and TheDuchy, a tutorial site founded in 2000, presents itself as the longest-running online school for shibari. Midori, based in San Francisco, wrote what Wikipedia counts as the first book in English to teach Japanese rope bondage. The guides to San Francisco and New York follow these older threads in their cities.

Conventions on the move

Several national gatherings have linked the city scenes. Lee Harrington recalled in 2013 that ShibariCon began in the Chicago area in 2004 with about seventy-five people and later drew about eight hundred, though the podcast’s notes warn that his memory mixed up details of several years. ROPECRAFT, a rope-focused convention, lists editions in Austin, New Orleans, San Antonio and Chicago from 2016 on, and online editions in 2020 and 2023. The North American Rope Innovation Exchange (NARiX), an unconference of up to about a hundred participants, is held twice a year in a different city each time, including Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Austin. In Denver, the Rope in the Rockies retreat is held at Studio Friction. The Chicago, Austin and Denver guides describe these events in their local setting.

Japanese lineages

Several American studios trace their teaching directly to Japan. LA Rope Dojo, founded in 2011, teaches in the style of Yukimura Haruki and has brought him and Naka Akira to Los Angeles. Teachers in San Francisco and Portland train with Hajime Kinoko of Tokyo and hold teaching credentials in his school (see Ichinawa-kai), and a Chicago school is building a North American base for Kinbaku Luxuria, the style of the Italian teacher Riccardo Wildties. See the guides to Los Angeles and Portland.

City by city

The other city guides show how varied local scenes are, from peer-run labs and member clubs to graded curricula and affinity nights: Seattle, Houston and Miami. Jones also observes, in the United States and Canada alike, a deference to practitioners who are Japanese or who learned from Japanese teachers; the debate this raises is discussed in the North America history.