Japanese rope bondage
Japanese rope bondage, in Western BDSM also known as shibari, is a Japanese style of erotic rope bondage which involves tying a person up using simple yet visually intricate patterns, usually with several pieces of thin rope. Artistic and erotic BDSM elements overlap in it.
Terminology
In Japanese, this type of bondage is known as kinbaku (緊縛, literally "tight binding"), and the related term kinbaku-bi (緊縛美) literally translates to "the beauty of tight binding".
The word shibari came into common use in Western BDSM circles at some point in the 1990s to describe the bondage art kinbaku. Shibari (縛り) is a Japanese word that broadly means "binding" or "tying", but is not used in Japan to refer to the subject of this article. So while Western BDSM uses the term shibari, in Japan only the term kinbaku is used.
Rope
The rope used is made of natural fibers (often jute, hemp or linen) and is known as asanawa (麻縄, literally "hemp rope"). It is 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). While the word asa (麻) means "hemp", jute is usually the material of choice in Japan while hemp is rare.
The term nawashi (縄師, literally "rope artist" or "rope practioner") referred historically to a maker of rope, but has come to mean (professional) rope bondager.
Characteristics
Japanese rope bondage focuses to a large degree on the aesthetics and display of the body. As a result, and due to the manipulation of body parts using rope to achieve this, it is common, though not always required, for models or participants to be fully naked. The art form also regularly incorporates other aspects of BDSM such as erotic humiliation. It may be used for restraint as well as solely being a visual. For example, the karada, a rope harness, in its pure form only encases the person without actually restraining their movement in any way.
In Japanese rope bondage, an emphasis is placed on how the rope should be sensually applied to the body of the bottom. The Master will continue to add layers of rope and even take care to place knots on certain erotic pressure points. Bondage can be made to support sexual intercourse (bondage sex). Harnesses make the bottom feel supported by the bondage. It also gives the Top many "grab" points to gain leverage while engaging in intercourse.
The allusion is to the use of hemp rope as an ancient method for restraining prisoners in a similar way that stocks or manacles are sometimes used in Western BDSM. To bind a person is to turn them from a free person into a prisoner with greatly reduced rights and subject to punishment.
Historic roots: hojōjutsu
Hojōjutsu (捕縄術) or torinawajutsu (literally "rope restraint technique") or just nawajutsu (縄術, "rope technique"), refers to the traditional Japanese military, law enforcement and martial arts techniques of restraining a person using cord or rope, as a precursor to modern handcuffs. It was the art of capturing and binding a non-cooperative suspect of a crime with rope to make them unable to flee or fight back. While it served mainly practical purposes, attention was still paid to visual and aesthetic concerns in the tying method as well as to the cultural needs of Japanese society. To save the prisoner the shame of being publicly bound, methods were used that allowed the prisoner to be securely restrained but contained no knots.
Hojōjutsu shows limited survival in the modern world, both in Japan and elsewhere. Torinawa techniques are taught as part of the curriculum learned by modern Japanese police officers and remain an advanced topic within some martial arts schools.
Hojōjutsu is culturally very distinct from kinbaku, but some of the techniques of Japanese sexual rope bondage originated with this military restraint technique.
See also
- Shibari ↗
- Hojōjutsu ↗
- This article uses material from Wipipedia website
External links
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