Last friday, at the shoot with MyWifeBound, my friend K introduced me to his new photographer friend as "Graydancer, the Shibari Master." I almost jumped down his throat.
"Please, please, please never call me a Shibari Master," I said, quite seriously. "I’m a rigger. I’m an artist. But I don’t do shibari–I just do rope."
Seriously. I did, to my shame, call myself a nawashi for my very first rope performance. I will even teach Japanese-inspired (or "based") bondage techniques. But I don’t know shibari, nor would I ever claim to have achieved "kinbaku". And why? Well, because of this particular statement by Osada Steve:
What I don’t appreciate are people who classify their ties as Shibari, when in fact their ties are reverse-engineered Japanese-inspired bondages. In my book, someone who has never been to Japan, someone who has never directly studied under any genuine Japanese Shibari practitioner (read: someone with a traceable lineage to one of the Shibari dynasties in Japan), someone who takes his knowledge from a picture on the Internet, or from watching a Japanese SM porn video, or from having attended a workshop that was mislabeled as a Shibari lecture, would be better off not making a fool of himself. Such a person should better describe his bondage in English words, perhaps as Japanese-inspired bondage, with emphasis on inspired…When you read discussions about whether a Korean could make a decent burrito with rice instead of wheat, and whether you could then still call it a Mexican burrito and if you could, then THEREFORE you too (and your cousin’s neighbor) have the right to call your bondage Shibari, you know what direction Shibari is taking in the West.
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