Inspiring Restraint – Not Just in Japanese. Cultural-Historical Connections to Bondage

“[…] it matters what stories we tell in order to tell other stories; it matters what knots tie knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what ties tie ties.”
– Donna Haraway

Anyone who has gotten a taste for bondage and wants to learn more about the techniques, schools, and origins of restraint practices—beyond improvised tying with a bathrobe belt—will sooner or later come across the Japanese arts of restraint known as shibari or kinbaku. The discussion then immediately turns to the Hojojutsu practices of the samurai, which date back to the Japanese Middle Ages and involved using rope restraints to subdue opponents. One learns that Shibari/Kinbaku developed almost organically out of Japanese everyday culture, which is entirely geared toward binding—after all, kimonos and gifts are also tied with a furoshiki. In his highly acclaimed book *The Beauty of Kinbaku*, Master “K” never tires of emphasizing how closely Shibari/Kinbaku is tied to Japanese…