Articles tagged: Semenawa (責め繩)

It was during the boom of SM magazines in the seventies and SM show companies in the eighties that Akechi Denki emerged as a stage director, soon moving on to adult film.

Kamui Jubei was born on September 13, 1959 (year 34 of the Showa era) and is a respected figure of classic kinbaku. He describes himself as kugutsu no kinbakushi (傀儡の緊縛師), “the rope puppeteer.”

Naka Akira (奈加あきら) was born on January 4, 1959 (year 34 of the Showa era) in Niigata. He discovered the world of shibari relatively late: around 1990, in the early years of the Heisei era, when he was about thirty.

If there is one name closely associated with semenawa, it is Naka Akira. Through his work and, especially, through training his students, he has played a decisive role in defining and spreading this way of understanding shibari.

In its most literal sense, it can be translated as “torture rope”. Yukimura sensei defined it in these terms:

Semenawa (責め繩) is one of the ways of understanding shibari that has gained the most presence in the West over recent decades.

The shibari style developed by Yukimura Haruki (雪村春樹) represents a particular way of understanding kinbaku in which rope stops being merely a tool of restraint and becomes a vehicle for non-verbal dialogue.