Japanese bondage

Kinbaku (緊縛) means "tight binding", while Kinbaku-bi (緊縛美) literally means "the beauty of tight binding". Kinbaku is a Japanese style of bondage or BDSM which involves tying a person up using simple yet visually intricate patterns, usually with several pieces of thin rope (often jute, hemp or linen and 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). In Japanese this natural-fibre rope is known as asanawa (麻縄). The allusion is to the use of hemp rope for restraining prisoners, as a symbol of power, in the same way that stocks or manacles are used in a Western BDSM context.^[1]

The word shibari came into common use in the West 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" in most contexts, but is used in BDSM to refer to this style of decorative bondage.^[2]

Shibari and Kinbaku focuses 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 and the art form regularly incorporates aspects of BDSM such as erotic humiliation. It may be used for restraint as well as solely being a visual.