In the genealogy of contemporary kinbaku there are figures whose value lies not in technical innovation or public profile, but in the careful safekeeping of a shared memory. Saikatsu, born, by his own account, in the late forties in Ishikawa Prefecture, belongs to that second category.
A witness before a protagonist
For twenty-four years he was the assistant and friend of Akechi Denki, one of the leading nawashi of the second half of twentieth-century Japan, and that long-sustained closeness made him less a disciple than the keeper of a living archive: notes, dates, names and anecdotes that he himself took care to preserve with the rigor of someone who knows that oral history, if it is not recorded, dies with the person who carries it.
His path, however, did not begin with Akechi, but much earlier, as a consumer.
A student in Tokyo in the mid-sixties, he came across Kitan Club magazine by chance at a classmate’s home, and from then on he became a regular reader of erotic and SM publications—Uramado, SM Collector, SM Select, SM Fan, SM Mania—and a viewer of the pinku eiga (ピンク映畫) films that proliferated in that decade.
This matters for understanding him: before he ever held a rope, Saikatsu spent almost twenty years as a close observer of a culture that remained deliberately underground in Japan. He summed it up himself in a sentence that captures the era well: “That world was truly clandestine, and we couldn’t talk about it openly.”
Joining Akechi’s circle
Saikatsu did not come to shibari looking to become a nawashi. He came, in 1979, as a spectator at Akechi Denki’s Phantom show, and two years later, almost by chance—while dropping off some rolls of film to be developed—he offered to fill the reception job that had become vacant.
From then on, for more than a decade, he was the most constant presence in Akechi’s working environment: receptionist, video operator, in charge of the background music at the shows and, finally, someone Akechi invited to try the rope for the first time, in 1983, without any prior explanation or instruction.
His account of that moment reveals the mode of transmission that prevailed in that generation: “He didn’t teach me how to do it. I simply learned from his example (...) I tied and untied, and that was it. He didn’t even tell me whether it was right or wrong.”
This learning by observation, without explicit correction or verbal feedback, stands in sharp contrast to the structured teaching systems that figures such as Miura Takumi would later promote.
Saikatsu was not, strictly speaking, Akechi’s student; he was his trusted assistant, present at every session during the ten years the office remained in Sasazuka, a period Akechi himself would later consider the fullest of his career. He always kept a deliberately low profile: he never claimed the title of disciple (deshi, 弟子) for himself, and in fact repeatedly stressed that Akechi formally recognized only three disciples, all women—Raika, Enka and Kadera.
When, for a single job for the production company Soft On Demand, Akechi lent him his rope and allowed him to use the name “Akechi Saiki” (明智才鬼), Saikatsu kept the corresponding business card as a personal memento but never used that name again, not even after Akechi’s death, when doing so would have been easy and perhaps profitable.
In a setting—the Japanese kinbaku scene—where inheriting a name or a lineage can become a matter of dispute, Saikatsu’s attitude offers a useful contrast: someone who preferred to preserve the accuracy of the facts rather than capitalize on his closeness to a leading figure.
Teaching after Akechi’s death
After Akechi Denki’s death in July 2005, Saikatsu taught rope classes for dominatrixes at Cordon Bleu in 2005 and 2006, and from 2011 he taught at Black Heart, the bar in Ginza, as Saikatsu (彩勝); in the magazine Mania Club he wrote as Shimokawa Satoru (下川哲).
One of his documented lessons, published in 2011, describes in detail kuchinawa shibari (口繩しばり), a gag tie that uses the body rope itself as a mouth restraint. The text is significant for its approach: alongside the technical instruction, Saikatsu explicitly brings in considerations about the consent of the person being tied, the risk of injury at the corners of the mouth and the need to untie slowly.
It is a teaching style that combines the raw aesthetics of the practice—the lesson itself speaks of “torment” (seme, 責め) and of the theatricality of dripping saliva—with explicit care for the physical integrity of the person receiving the tie, a balance not always present in the materials of the time.
At the same time, he also held an advisory role within the Bakuyukai (縛友会), the association founded in 1998 with Akechi himself as its first president, and which would pass to Miura Takumi after his death. Although Saikatsu never held a formal position in its structure—unlike Miura or Harutokyo, the second-generation vice-president—he regularly took part in the technical assessment sessions, checking the tension, form and timing of the ties being examined together with Miura and Marou.
His critical view of the Bakuyukai’s evolution toward a dojo (道場) model—a term that, he explained, was not used in the early years, when the sessions were simply called “training meetings” (koshukai, 講習會)—offers a rare perspective: that of someone who lived through the shift from an informal, craft-based transmission to a system of grades and progressive ranking, now successfully exported to the international scene.
On Miura’s resulting style, Saikatsu was direct without being hostile: “I feel his style is slightly different from Akechi’s (...) He calls it Bakuyu style, but really it’s just Miura’s style,” a remark that does not seek to delegitimize Miura’s work, but simply to distinguish, with historiographical precision, between passing on a technique and creating a style of one’s own.
Terminology and ethical stance
Beyond technique, Saikatsu also left a reflection on the vocabulary of the craft that deserves to be recorded in its own right. He refused to use the term kinbakushi, always preferring nawashi, true to Akechi’s own usage; and he distinguished between kinbaku (緊縛) and shibari with a precision he also admitted was hard to put fully into words: “I think the word shibari weighs more than kinbaku (...) If you understand the meaning of the noun kinbaku, it becomes the verb shibari.”
Far from any wish to systematize a closed vocabulary, this distinction reflects the fluid and largely subjective nature of Japanese bondage terminology, as he himself acknowledged when he noted that “everyone has their own interpretation, even in Japan.”
Nor did he idealize the title: “You don’t need any qualification to be a nawashi: if you have a business card printed that says so, you are one. But I want to tie without leaving any harm on the other person.”
His ethical stance, recorded in several of his talks, insisted on a point that was not always evident in the world he described: gratitude toward the person who consents to be tied.
He considered it inappropriate to introduce a play partner as “my slave” outside the private context of the practice, preferring the word “partner,” and he reserved his firmest criticism for those, Japanese and foreigners alike, who started teaching after minimal training: “There are people who start teaching after attending class only a few times, and I think that’s out of place.”
At a time of rapid international expansion of shibari, this insistence on responsibility toward the person being tied over speed of transmission is probably his most transferable contribution to the craft, beyond any specific technique.
A discreet figure of deep values
Those who knew him agree in describing him as a discreet person, uninterested in self-promotion, a trait one of those close to him summed up by saying that, together with Matsui Kenji, he represented “what today might be called the old school: sadomasochism and eroticism revolved around the model, not around the person tying.”
The same source described him as someone who “kept his integrity intact, never compromising it for commercial reasons.”
His value for the historiography of kinbaku lies in having been, for more than four decades, a close witness to and reliable memory of one of the central figures of postwar kinbaku, and in having later passed on, with the same precision, both the inherited technique and care for the person being tied.
His notebooks have revealed, for example, how much Akechi was influenced by the evolution of Matsui Kenji’s suspensions, or that it was a seller of leather SM goods, a martial arts enthusiast, who introduced him to hojojutsu after seeing him perform at the Black & White club in Otsuka.
Saikatsu died on July 1, 2024 (year 6 of the Reiwa era).
On November 2, 2025, a gathering in memory of Miura Takumi and Saikatsu was held at the Kanna studio (Meguro, Tokyo), organized by Kamui Jubei and Shima Shiko.
Obituary (July 2024)
Published shortly after the news of his death became known.
Many may not know his name, and not everyone may have met him in person.
An hour after writing about Akechi Kanna’s upcoming Phantom Show, the sad news arrived. He was known to be ill, and one of the reasons for the trip to Japan at that time was precisely to see him; it was not possible, by just a few days.
He was Akechi Denki’s main assistant, and he took over from him teaching rope at the prestigious Black Heart bar in Ginza.
He is also remembered for coming to give a private pulley demonstration, in the style of Akechi Denki, in the early nineties; for his frequent presence at the Bakuyukai meetings in Sugamo; and for being present, very often, at Akechi Kanna’s shows and salons. And he is remembered, above all, for his kindness and his willingness to help.
Sayonara, Saikatsu sensei.
EN