We Went To Japan To Study Shibari: A Tale Of Loss, Power Play & Abuse

When Maia and I decided to spend a month in Japan studying Shibari, it felt like a dream.

We imagined ourselves in a serene tatami room, surrounded by incense and quiet discipline, being guided through complex knots by a strict yet benevolent sensei. We knew it would be challenging, but we didn’t realize how much of that challenge would come from the mind, not the rope.

Out of the 70 hours we spent with Master Yagami Ren, we probably held the ropes in our hands for less than five. The rest was… psychological warfare.

Subtle tests. Long silences. Hidden meanings. And a cultural divide so wide it could swallow your sense of self.

One thing you learn fast in Japan: mastery has nothing to do with quantity, but with precision.

In the West, we learn by trial and error. We’re not afraid to make fools of ourselves. We fail forward. In Japan, they wait. They perfect. They don’t move to the next step until the previous one becomes a natural extension of the body.

In some tea schools, you can spend three years just learning to sit properly in seiza before being allowed to touch the teapot. We, impatient, certification-horny Westerners, would’ve already poured a hundred cups of tea by then. Maybe messy, maybe imperfect, but done.

Now imagine applying that same ethos to something as intimate and intricate as Shibari, where not only precision, but energy, emotion, and sexuality are involved.

For me, Shibari has always been the physical embodiment of hypnosis — a way to touch trance.

I began studying it three years ago with students of Hajime Kinoko, including Marie Sauvage, Tati Limati and Julieta Chiara (yes, only women). The art fascinated me: how the body becomes a mirror for the psyche, how the rope becomes an extension of will and connection.

Like many Western students, I dreamed of being certified by Kinoko himself.

Looking back, I see how naïve that was — flying across the world to earn a stamp of legitimacy from a culture I barely understood. I was eager, ambitious, maybe even arrogant. I wanted proof I was “good enough.”

But Japan does not care about your ambition. Japan watches. Tests. Waits.

The Mind Games Begin

A year before the trip, I reached out to Kinoko’s assistant.

To my surprise, the reply came quickly: the Master would be happy to teach us in Tokyo the following spring. All we had to do was confirm.

In January, when I sent that confirmation, everything changed.

Suddenly, Kinoko-san was “too busy.”

New projects, we were told. Maybe next time.

But we soon found out that wasn’t true.

Another student we knew had booked private lessons with him during the exact same dates — and was accepted. So the message was clear: we had been rejected.

Was it because of Shibari-world drama? My falling out with one of his protégées? The gossip about stolen rope designs from one of his white student? Or simply because he’d lost interest in us? We actually would find out later.

That’s something to understand about Japanese masters — they will never tell you why. The lesson is in your reaction.

There are three great Kinbakushi known in the West:

Naka Akira, Hajime Kinoko, and Yagami Ren.

We’d met Yagami a few months before, at a workshop in Antwerp.

He was everything you’d expect from a Japanese master and everything you wouldn’t: composed yet volatile, charming yet cruel, moving like a martial artist while tying with surgical precision. When he tied Maia that night, it was like watching hypnosis, aikido, and sex collide into one act of ritualized control. I was mesmerized.

So when Kinoko rejected us, we wrote to Yagami.

He said yes.

And that’s how, months later, Maia and I boarded a flight to Tokyo, hearts pounding, ropes packed, to study Shibari under a man who would test not only our technique, but our relationship, our resilience, and our sense of self.