Articles tagged: History

We start with a basic question: what do we mean by shibari? We review the origins of the terms shibari and kinbaku and establish an operational definition of shibari as the erotic art of Japanese bondage, the foundation on which the entire course is built.

Estimated reading time: 12 minutes.

Shibari cannot be understood without knowing the culture that gave birth to it. The environment, social organization, and beliefs shaped a Japanese way of understanding efficiency, the body, and sexuality that explains much of what shibari is today.

Estimated reading time: 8 minutes.

The history of shibari includes episodes that should not be romanticized. Facing them head-on, without myths or whitewashing, helps us understand where many of its techniques come from and draw a clear line between that past and a consensual practice between adults.

Estimated reading time: 10 minutes.

Japan organizes its chronology into eras tied to the reign of each emperor, and each one reflects the social and political climate of its time. Going through them allows us to follow the birth of shibari and its evolution up to the present.

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes.

In the Meiji era, the industrialization of publishing favored the appearance of adult publications, and the censorship imposed by the new moral rules forced people to look for other ways of expressing eroticism. In the Taisho era, with Itoh Seiu and the eroguro (erotic-grotesque – エログロ) movement, shibari began to take shape as an erotic expression.

Estimated reading time: 8 minutes.

Shibari developed during the Showa era, always tied to the Japanese adult industry. Postwar magazines, exchange with the West, pinku eiga (ピンク映畫) cinema and, later, video transformed its formats and distribution, giving rise to the works and artists that would define the technical future of shibari.

Estimated reading time: 8 minutes.

With the Heisei era, shibari crossed borders: a new generation of riggers became known in the West, developing their technique and organizing themselves into their own styles. The Reiwa era, marked by the pandemic and by legal changes in the audiovisual industry, reshaped that market, popularizing the practice as an erotic experience between couples.

Estimated reading time: 8 minutes.

Estimated reading time: 0 minutes.

There is an even deeper consequence: when the narrative changes, it is not only what we think we know about the past that changes; what we pay attention to changes too.

This delightful 1969 film, Blind Beast (Moju, 盲獣), is a complete guide to understanding the delicate aesthetic blend the Japanese call “grotesque” (or “guturesque,” depending on who says it).

A Japanese writer and a fundamental reference in the history and evolution of the SM genre in Japan.

An individual category helps us interpret the world. A shared category also helps identify who belongs to the group and who doesn’t.

Go, Go, Second Time Virgin (ゆけゆけ二度目の処女, Yuke Yuke Nidome no Shojo, 1969), directed by Wakamatsu Koji, is a raw, disturbing work that tells the story of two teenagers, Poppo and Tsukio, whose lives are marked by trauma and violence.

Saikatsu’s testimony, translated from Japanese, on the Bakuyukai and the people around it: Harutokyo, Kanna, Jubei, Matsui and Kitagawa.

Communities don’t think; people do, and they all share the same cognitive system.

Japonorama for December 2023: Hajime Kinoko’s North American tour and the reissue of Itoh Seiu’s work.

Japonorama for January and February 2024: Akechi Kanna and his Kinbaku Salon in Tokyo, a photo session with Hourai Kasumi in the snow, the memorial for Yukimura Haruki and the special edition of Coco Ropes.

The sixth edition of Japonorama, for September 2024. This edition covers, among other things, the Onawa Asobi festival and Tenma Haru’s shibari style.

The period around the turn of the year is busy in Japan, since New Year is celebrated twice within a few weeks: once following the Western calendar and once following the Chinese calendar.

Kawahara Azumi (河原梓水) is a Japanese researcher whose work has played a decisive role in placing sadomasochism, postwar SM magazines, kinbaku and the historical forms of “perverse sexuality” within a rigorous academic framework.

In July 2026, the online publication Kinbaku Today presented an archive of historical Japanese SM magazines, with issues from the fifties and sixties that can be viewed online.

Kitan Club (奇譚クラブ) was published from 1946 or 1947 (year 21 or 22 of the Showa era) until 1975 as a cheap magazine printed on low-quality paper, one of the so-called kasutori zasshi (カストリ雑誌, pulp magazines). Over that time, and above all from the 1990s onward, it became an international reference point for Japanese sadomasochism (SM) and kinbaku (緊縛).

Suma Toshiyuki (須磨利之, 1920–1992), known professionally as Minomura Kou (美濃村晃) and also as Kita Reiko (喜多玲子), was a Japanese editor and visual artist and a pioneer of kinbaku.

In the West, we face Japanese terminology that has already been reinterpreted along the way and that often reaches us distorted and secondhand.

Is shibari really Japanese? Its origin undoubtedly places it in Japan, but today there are more practitioners, communities and schools outside the islands than inside them.

A Japanese bakushi (縛師), he was born in 1930 (year 5 of the Showa era) in Asakusa, Tokyo, and died on September 9, 2013 (year 25 of the Heisei era), at the age of 83. His professional career spanned almost 60 years, during which he took part in the origin, development and spread of what we now understand as shibari kinbaku.

What we now understand as shibari (縛り) originated in Japan in the first decades of the twentieth century. It was born as a subgenre within the porn industry, and it was after the Second World War that it began to attract Western attention.

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.

Were the Victorian “English discipline” and “French vice” decisive for the flourishing of shibari as such in early twentieth-century Japan?

Are the fetishization of the exotic and Jap-exploitation relevant elements in shaping the way bondage is understood and lived in the West?

During Japan’s decades of rapid economic growth, love hotels became a characteristic presence in the country’s urban landscape and popular culture.

Kita Reiko (喜多玲子), a pseudonym of Minomura Kou (美濃村晃), is the creator of this illustration titled Ten Positions of a Naked Tied Woman and one of the great reference figures in the history of shibari.

Kitan Club (奇譚クラブ) is a Japanese magazine unique in the history of postwar popular and fetish culture in Japan.

Dismissing things quickly brings peace of mind; suspending judgment for a while produces knowledge.

Historically, there is no specific material associated with the practice of shibari. Everything suggests that each practitioner used whatever they had to hand.

In May 1936, police in Tokyo arrested a woman at an inn who was carrying her lover’s severed penis wrapped in her kimono.

From October 8 to 12, 2026, Tokyo hosted the photo exhibition “The World of Yukimura Haruki: 10 Years After His Death,” devoted to the kinbaku (緊縛) master Yukimura Haruki (雪村春樹), who had died a decade earlier. The show was organized and curated by his son, the photographer Higurashi Keisuke (日暮圭介), and was split between two venues.

At what point does a depiction of a historical execution become an illustration of a contemporary erotic practice?

Beyond his recognition as a kinbaku master, Yukimura Haruki (雪村春樹) should also be remembered as a creator with a personal vision that was, in its day, radical.

Yukiseme (雪責め) is one of the classic scenes or themes of shibari, inherited directly from classical Japanese theater and printmaking.