Project note

About Shibari Atlas BETA

Shibari Atlas is a public research project on bakushi, kinbaku and global shibari history. The same source-backed dataset is presented through three readings: a time-based lineage graph, a geographic map and an events schedule.

345people
270entities
1551connections
918sources

What This Is

The project tracks how Japanese rope practices moved from historical restraint systems and twentieth-century publishing into contemporary international scenes. It is not a directory of everyone who ties rope. It is a curated dataset of people, schools, studios, dojos, bars, events, publications, films and context nodes with enough public evidence to explain a historical or structural role.

The old working name was Bakushi Map. The public umbrella is now Shibari Atlas; the lineage graph remains Bakushi Lineage.

Three Surfaces

One dataset, three readings. Each surface answers a different question; nodes and sources are shared.

  1. Lineage

    1,551 documented connections

    Time-based genealogy graph. Vertical position is time, columns group practitioners by school, edges are documented teacher, collaboration and publication ties.

    Anchor figures
  2. Map

    43 countries · 104 cities

    626 located nodes pinned to where they actually exist or happened: studios, dojos, bars, events and resident practitioners on a navigable world map.

    Dense cities
  3. Events

    61 recurring events

    Rolling twelve-month schedule of festivals, conventions, camps and performance dates, with a per-year archive linking each occurrence back into the lineage graph.

    Up next

Beta Status

The interface is public, but the data is still being expanded and corrected. Some regions are much better covered than others, and some historical lineages have cleaner public documentation than contemporary scenes.

Missing dates are intentional when practitioners have not published them. Legal names are avoided unless they are already part of the person's chosen public profile.

Data And Licensing

Structured facts are released under CC0 where legally possible: IDs, names, public aliases, years, locations, node types and relationship types. Original project prose is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Third-party sources remain under their own rights. Source links support verification and attribution; they do not import linked text into this project's license.

Lineage Map Events Methodology Sources

Corrections And Credits

Corrections, missing source leads and boundary questions are welcome at pussynawa@proton.me. The project is curated by Vsevolod Moreuton.

Thanks to RopeMarks, Asiana, RomKnots, Nick Freerider, Aleksei Kalatsky, Federico Kirigami, bluefeathers and Spartanawa for early feedback, corrections and source leads.