Seattle Shibari
The teaching project of Jonathan Ryan and Sappho, offering small-group workshops in the Seattle area and in Portland alongside private lessons and performance bookings. Its Seattle-area workshops in autumn 2026 are held at Royal Flash Studio in Tukwila, south of the city.
Seattle Shibari is led by Jonathan Ryan with co-teacher Sappho. The school’s own pages say Ryan studied Japanese history, culture and language, has traveled to Japan repeatedly over three decades, trained in Tokyo, and holds a high-level teaching license from Hajime Kinoko, describing him as a senior instructor of Kinoko’s Tokyo-based Ichinawa Kai. The same pages credit him with about sixteen years of rope practice, performances and teaching in cities from Paris and Rome to Tokyo, Shanghai and Bangkok, and a twenty-year career in curriculum design. Sappho is presented as teaching from a professional medical background and a somatic understanding of how bodies move in rope.
The school describes its method as a mix of traditional Japanese teaching and modern Western instructional research. Workshops are deliberately small, capped at eight tying pairs, and taught to pairs, so students come with a partner and their own rope. The pages set out a progression: Shibari 101 for foundations, then floor work workshops, then partial suspension, then full suspension classes. For Seattle dates the venue address is sent with the ticket confirmation.
Beyond group classes, Seattle Shibari offers private lessons, shibari photo shoots and bookings for stage performance. Private rope sessions and one-to-one lessons in Oregon run through its sister project in Portland, at the Portland Shibari Salon. The school states that people of every ethnicity, gender expression, sexual orientation, identity and body type are welcome, and says it has taught thousands of students over the past decade.