At what point does a depiction of a historical execution become an illustration of a contemporary erotic practice?
The image illustrating this article comes from volume 12 of the Joruri Monogatari Emaki (浄瑠璃物語絵巻, Illustrated Scroll of the Tale of Joruri), painted by the master Iwasa Matabei in the first half of the seventeenth century, during the Edo period. The work, designated a Cultural Property of Japan, is now held at the MOA Museum of Art in Atami.
The scene shows the climax of the story. After discovering that Lady Joruri’s mother—or stepmother, depending on the version—had indirectly caused the death of his beloved, the young warrior Minamoto no Yoshitsune (Ushiwakamaru) orders her execution. The woman is bound, rolled up in a bamboo mat (sumaki, 簀卷き), and thrown into the river as punishment.
It is a harsh image: a violent, public execution, staged as a warning and as an expression of power and justice as understood in medieval Japan.
And yet it is surprisingly common to find this image, and others like it, presented as historical examples or “precursors of shibari.”
At what point does a depiction of an execution become an illustration of a contemporary erotic practice?
Answering that question means stepping away from shibari for a moment and looking at a much broader phenomenon. What we are really examining is how communities build their own narratives.
Appropriating the past
Every community develops a collective imagination. Over time, images, symbols, characters, objects, and historical episodes come to represent the group’s identity—even when they never truly belonged to it in the first place.
This is a common process. Political movements reinterpret historical events; religions absorb symbols from earlier cultures; nations turn certain figures into national heroes centuries after their deaths.
Shibari is no exception. Like many minority practices—at least in statistical terms—it has developed a community with a high degree of personal investment.
For many people, it stops being simply an activity and becomes an important part of who they are.
And once a practice becomes part of its practitioners’ identity, the way they interpret the world around it changes as well.
Images cease to be mere historical documents and become potential points of reference. Visual similarities begin to be perceived as historical connections.
What starts as a simple iconographic coincidence can eventually become woven into a collective narrative, as though it had always been part of it.
Most of these processes do not arise from a conscious desire to falsify history. In fact, they tend to emerge precisely where information is scarce, fragmentary, or difficult to verify.
The history of sexuality, erotic practices, and everyday life is extraordinarily difficult to reconstruct once we look back several centuries.
Even “modern” societies—with newspapers, archives, and abundant written records—tell us very little about how ordinary people actually experienced something as intimate as sexuality three or four hundred years ago.
In Japan, the difficulty is even greater. Language barriers, lost records, cultural change, and a long-standing tendency to keep public and private life apart mean that many aspects remain debated even among specialists.
That gap inevitably creates uncertainty. And wherever there is uncertainty, competing narratives emerge to explain the past.
Not all of these narratives are equally likely to take hold. Communities tend to preserve the ones that best fit their identity—and that, in turn, help reinforce it.
In other words, when there are no definitive answers, interpretations that offer historical continuity, prestige, or legitimacy are more likely to be accepted and spread than those that portray the practice as recent, isolated, or culturally marginal.
This is where one of the key concepts in this article becomes useful: symbolic capital.
Symbolic capital: when history confers prestige
The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argued that, alongside economic and cultural capital, there is a less tangible but extraordinarily influential form of social wealth: symbolic capital.
Symbolic capital is not measured in money or property. It appears as prestige, recognition, legitimacy, or authority.
It is the value a person, institution, or practice acquires when it is seen as worthy of respect, relevant, or socially valuable.
A university founded five hundred years ago carries symbolic capital that does not depend solely on the quality of its teaching. So do a thousand-year-old temple, a protected designation of origin, or a craft tradition passed down over centuries.
Age, historical continuity, and association with a cultural legacy create a kind of prestige that no advertising campaign can manufacture overnight.
Human communities have understood this mechanism intuitively for centuries.
That is why they seek genealogies, claim forerunners, establish lineages, rescue historical figures, or reinterpret episodes from the past to fit them into their own narrative.
It is not only about explaining where they come from. It is also about explaining why they deserve recognition.
In this context, history is no longer just a discipline that studies the past; it becomes a source of legitimacy for the present.
Shibari follows the same logic. Presenting it as an art form that emerged mainly during the twentieth century offers one historical narrative.
Presenting it as the culmination of a Japanese tradition several centuries old offers a very different one.
Neither narrative merely describes an origin; each also conveys a judgment of value. The second suggests continuity, cultural depth, and authenticity. As a result, it accumulates considerably more symbolic capital.
This does not mean that those who defend that interpretation are necessarily acting in bad faith. In many cases, something far more subtle is at work.
When a community encounters an image, document, or historical practice that visually resembles what defines its identity, it is natural to wonder whether the two are connected.
That curiosity is the starting point of any legitimate research. The problem arises when the direction of the reasoning shifts, and instead of asking:
What does this image actually represent within its historical context?
the question becomes:
How can this image be made part of the history of shibari?
The difference may seem small, but methodologically it is enormous. In the first case, the historical context determines the interpretation. In the second, a contemporary interpretation begins to reshape the historical context.
Research stops being grounded in sources and starts being grounded in the group’s identity. This shift usually begins with small, seemingly harmless additions: an illustration that resembles a tie, a fictional story, an old photograph, an engraving of a prisoner.
In fact, there are hardly any engravings depicting supposed rope-restraint techniques applied to prisoners. Nor was there a prison system comparable to today’s. The image of noble martial arts associated with these practices is, to a large extent, a Western romanticization that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century.
Each new example may seem reasonable in isolation. But as dozens or hundreds of examples are gradually absorbed into the same narrative, the perception of the whole changes.
The community begins to feel an ever-growing sense of historical continuity—not necessarily because new conclusive evidence has appeared, but because the narrative itself has gradually expanded what it considers part of its history.
This process is especially common when categories have blurred boundaries. If no one can clearly establish what belongs within a practice and what lies outside it, almost any meaningful resemblance can end up being read as a legitimate precursor.
And here another phenomenon comes into play: communities do not only select the past; they also select the questions they consider natural.
Over time, it no longer seems surprising that an image of a medieval execution appears in a discussion about shibari. What starts to seem surprising is that anyone would question the association.
To understand how this shift happens, we need to look at how the human brain organizes and recognizes categories: why certain images feel instantly familiar, why others are dismissed almost without thought, and, above all, how a community can gradually push the boundaries of a category until it changes the very historical narrative it builds around it.
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