Kinbaku (緊縛), also called shibari (縛り) [Edit]

Kinbaku (緊縛), also called shibari (縛り)  is a type of Japanese decorative bondage. In Japanese kinbaku (緊縛) literally means “tight binding,” while shibari (縛り) broadly means “binding” or “tying” in most contexts, but those words are used in BDSM to refer to this style of decorative bondage.

Terminology

In the 1960s, people such as Eikichi Osada began to appear performing live SM shows often including a large amount of kinbaku; today such performers are often referred to as Nawashi (rope master) or Bakushi (from kinbakushi, meaning bondage master).

History

Bondage as a sexual activity first came to notice in Japan in the late Edo period (about 1600s to 1860s). Seiu Ito (伊藤晴雨, Itō Seiu), also romanized as Seiyu Itoh (1882-1961) was a Japanese painter who is today widely considered the father of modern kinbaku. Kinbaku became widely popular in Japan in the 1950s through magazines such as Kitan Club and Yomikiri Romance, which published the first naked bondage photographs. The actual term kinbaku was first developed and used in the May–June 1952 issue of Kitan Club by author and Bakushi Minomura Kou and Bakushi Tsujimura Takashi. Until that issue, most magazines only had nude photographs of women but few in bondage. In order to specify the act of erotic bondage as opposed to the act of just tying the word kinbaku was then created. In the 1960s, people such as Eikichi Osada began to appear performing live SM shows often including a large amount of kinbaku; today such performers are often referred to as Nawashi (rope master) or Bakushi (from kinbakushi, meaning bondage master).

Materials and Technique

Kinbaku involves tying a person up using simple yet visually intricate patterns, usually with several pieces of thin rope (often jute, hemp or linen) and generally around 6 mm (0.24 in) in diameter, but sometimes as small as 4 mm (0.16 in), and between 7–8 m (23–26 ft) long. In Japanese, this natural-fiber rope is known as asanawa (麻縄); the Japanese vocabulary does not make a distinction between hemp and jute. The use of hemp can involve a reference to the use of hemp rope for restraining prisoners, as a symbol of power, in the same way that handcuffs are often used in a Western BDSM context.

Related Honors

Winners of the Geoff Mains Non-Fiction Book Award from the National Leather Association – International include (among others) the 2008 winner Shibari You Can Use: Japanese Rope Bondage and Erotic Macrame, by Lee Harrington, and the 2016 winner More Shibari You Can Use: Passionate Rope Bondage & Intimate Connection, also by Lee Harrington. (Shibari is another word for kinbaku.)

 

 

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