Bakushi (縛師, lit. “tying master”) is the Japanese term for a rope artist — a practitioner of kinbaku. The word denotes a person; the practice itself is kinbaku or shibari. Traditionally the title was reserved for established rope masters working professionally with photographers, magazines and stage performers in twentieth-century Japan; outside Japan it is used more loosely to describe any serious rope practitioner.

Kinbaku (緊縛, lit. “tight binding”) is the Japanese art of erotic rope bondage. It descends from hojōjutsu, the Edo-period martial art of restraining prisoners with rope, and was reshaped through twentieth-century SM magazines, photography and performance into the form practised today. Kinbaku emphasises the relational, emotional and aesthetic charge of the tying — not only the technical patterns.

What is the difference between shibari and kinbaku?

Shibari (縛り) and kinbaku (緊縛) are often used interchangeably and the line between them is contested. In broad practice: shibari literally means “tying” and is commonly used outside Japan as an umbrella term for Japanese-style rope work; kinbaku carries a stronger sense of the erotic, ritual and emotional tradition rooted in twentieth-century Japan. Most practitioners use both words depending on context and audience.

Hojōjutsu (捕縄術) is the Edo-period martial art of arresting and restraining prisoners with rope, developed for samurai and feudal-era police forces. Its formal patterns and rules about cord placement on the body fed directly into the visual vocabulary of twentieth-century kinbaku, even though the latter is an entertainment / erotic practice with no enforcement function.

How is the Bakushi Map data sourced?

Every person, studio or bar appears only when there is enough public evidence to anchor them meaningfully — typically a combination of Nawapedia entries, ShibariStudy listings, festival rosters, interview transcripts, archived venue pages and the practitioners’ own published material. Direct apprenticeship (deshi) edges require explicit confirmation from at least one source; lighter influence / peer-study edges are looser. Full methodology, source ranking and edge semantics are in the sections above; the public source list is at /sources.

Why are some practitioners' birth years missing?

Many bakushi do not publish their birth year, and the map respects that. A missing date is a deliberate gap, not an oversight. Where someone has self-disclosed a year (in an interview, a magazine bio, etc.) it is recorded; otherwise the field stays empty. The same principle applies to legal names versus stage names — the map uses whatever the practitioner has publicly chosen to share.

What lineages and schools does the map cover?

The map currently groups practitioners into eleven named lineages plus an “independent” bucket: foundational (Seiu Ito and the Taishō / early-Shōwa pioneers), Nureki, Akechi, Yukimura-ryū, Naka-ryū, Osada / Western, Kanna-ryū, Yagami-ryū, Kazami-ryū, Kinoko line and independent. Lineage is assigned by the practitioner’s primary teacher / stated affiliation; cross-lineage practitioners are visible in their connections.

Methodology — Bakushi Map

This map is a research graph of shibari / kinbaku people, schools, studios, SM / fetish / rope bars, festivals, publications, platforms, material infrastructure and historical context. It is not a complete directory, a ranking, a certification registry, or a claim that every important person is visible.

The project tries to answer one narrow question: which public people, places, works and institutions help explain how rope knowledge, aesthetics, infrastructure and scene history moved between eras and regions?

What The Map Shows

Nodes are added when they help explain transmission, scene infrastructure or historical context:

people with public rope identities as teachers, performers, organizers, authors, photographers, riggers, models, rope makers or lineage carriers
recurring studios, dojos, festivals, conventions, communities and education platforms
publications, films, production labels and material projects when they shaped rope culture or connect multiple existing nodes
context nodes when a historical, regional, technological or political factor explains why clusters moved or changed

The graph is intentionally selective. A person or event may be important locally and still stay out of the visible graph if the public sources are too thin, if the node would expose private information, or if it would create an isolated leaf with little explanatory value.

Evidence Levels

The map separates evidence into practical levels:

Strong public evidence: official bios, studio pages, event rosters, publisher pages, interviews, archived festival pages, books, public talks, stable community documentation, or direct source pages maintained by the person / organization.
Medium public evidence: public social posts, public Telegram / Instagram previews, directory rows, event mirrors, podcast episode pages, third-party writeups, or archived traces that support a limited claim but need careful wording.
Weak evidence: unsourced lists, reposts, dead pages without archive context, search snippets, anonymous claims, private screenshots, memory, rumor, or broad community knowledge.

Strong evidence can support nodes, biography facts, source links and relationship edges. Medium evidence can support limited role / event / link context when it corroborates an already public identity. Weak evidence is used as a research lead, not as a public claim.

If two sources conflict, the map prefers the more direct source: the person's own current public statement, then official studio / event records, then interviews and specialist archives, then broader secondary sources. Older sources are kept only when they explain historical context and do not conflict with a later correction.

Source Handling

Preferred sources are official pages, event rosters, studio biographies, interviews, archived festival pages, publisher pages, public talks and stable community documentation. Directory rows and social posts are used as leads, not as enough evidence on their own, unless they corroborate an already public role.

Each visible node should have at least one public link unless it is a context node whose evidence is captured through reusable source records. Internally, repeated sources are tracked once and reused across related people, entities, relationships and works so the same evidence does not need to be duplicated in every biography.

Source links support verification and attribution. They do not mean that the linked source endorses Bakushi Map, and they do not import the linked text into the map's own license.

From Claim To Graph

Not every true or interesting fact becomes a visible edge. The map uses the smallest public representation that explains the data:

Graph node: used for a person, entity, work-like infrastructure, event or context object that explains multiple relationships or a structurally important bridge.
Relationship edge: used when a source directly supports a specific connection and the connection helps explain transmission, event presence, collaboration, publication, production, teaching, material infrastructure or lineage.
Biography context: used when a fact is useful for understanding the node but is too narrow, private, ambiguous or weak to become an edge.
Source-only note: used when a candidate is worth remembering for future research but should not be visible yet.
Rejected / do-not-link note: used when an attractive inference is misleading, unsafe, duplicate, or unsupported.

The project avoids hub inflation. A magazine, festival, podcast, adult-media studio, social platform or directory is not connected to everyone it mentions. Edges are added only when the relationship is meaningful for this map, not merely because two names appear on the same page.

Relationship Types

The map distinguishes relationship strength:

deshi: explicit formal apprenticeship, certification, lineage relationship, named successor, licensed instructor status, or sustained primary-teacher relationship framed as lineage.
influence: workshop study, private lessons, named stylistic influence, mentor wording, video study, repeated study, or non-formal learning.
dojo: founded, teaches at, runs, belongs to, or anchors a structured school / studio / education container.
performance: presenter, workshop, festival, convention, stage, or event appearance.
collab: co-created, co-organized, co-founded, partner project, spouse / durable rope partnership, or peer collaboration where the source frames a real working relationship.
magazine / film: publication, media, or production relationship when the media object is structurally relevant.

Workshop attendance alone is not modeled as deshi. A one-off workshop usually stays as source context; if the source frames it as important study or influence, it can become influence. Event co-presence alone is not a relationship between two people.

Edges should point in the semantically useful direction. Teacher / lineage / influence edges usually point teacher to student or influence source to influenced person. Event and studio edges usually point person to entity.

Living People And Privacy

For living or contemporary people, the map uses public scene names by default. Birth years, legal names, private residences and adult-media aliases are not added unless the person uses them in a stable public professional context and the information is necessary for the graph.

Missing birth years are expected. They are not a data-quality failure.

Locations are public scene anchors, not private addresses. They may represent a studio city, festival city, public teaching base, diaspora context or country-level scene context when a city is not public.

If a living person asks for a correction, removal, identity split, privacy downgrade or safer wording, that request is handled as a high-priority data-quality signal. Public safety and consent matter more than preserving a visually dense graph.

Self-Reported Information

Direct self-reported corrections or additions from the person described by a node may be used when they clearly allow the information to be published. This includes corrections sent by email, direct message, public comment, or another direct first-person channel.

Self-reported information is treated as first-party internal provenance, not as a public source. Private emails, messages and screenshots are not published in the source list.

Allowed self-reported updates include:

current preferred name, spelling, pronouns, role, location scope, public links or removal requests
corrections to biography, teacher / student framing, spouse / partner context, studio affiliation or event framing
identity splits where two public names were incorrectly merged
privacy downgrades where public data should be made less specific

For strong lineage, school, rank, certification or controversial claims, a public source is preferred. If the person directly confirms the claim and explicitly allows publication, the map may use conservative wording and mark the source internally as self-reported.

Adult-Media And Sensitive Sources

Adult-media sources are handled narrowly. They are included only when they support a rope-specific public role: rigger, bondage director, rope consultant, production rope educator, selected rope-video work, or a production project that materially shaped rope visual culture.

The map does not import filmographies, one-off performer credits, scraped adult databases, ambiguous aliases or links that expose private identity beyond a public rope role.

Sensitive sources should not be used to out, deanonymize, shame, rank or sensationalize a person. If a fact is not needed to explain rope transmission or infrastructure, it should stay out.

Licensing And Attribution

The public dataset is split by content type. Structured factual data is released under CC0 where legally possible: IDs, names, aliases, dates, public scene locations, node types, relationship types, coordinates, source IDs and URLs. Original Bakushi Map prose is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0: biographies, descriptive summaries, source notes, methodology text and other expressive writing.

Third-party source material remains under its original license or rights status. Source links support verification and attribution; they do not make the linked text part of the Bakushi Map license.

Biographies and notes should be independently written factual summaries. The project does not intentionally import verbatim third-party prose or close translations from source pages. If copied or closely adapted prose is found, it should be rewritten, removed, or attributed and licensed according to the original source requirements.

Quality Controls

Every data batch should aim for:

public links or reusable source records for touched nodes and edges
conservative relationship types with short edge notes
source-only parking for weak candidates
explicit do-not-link notes for tempting but unsupported inferences
validation before commit
small coherent commits rather than large mixed research dumps

Known uncertainty is preferable to false precision. The map should say less when the sources say less.

Corrections

Send corrections to pussynawa@proton.me.

Corrections should include a stable public source and a specific claim when possible:

which node or relationship is wrong
what should change
the source URL supporting the correction
whether the change affects privacy, identity, dates, location, school / lineage, or relationship type

If the correction comes directly from the person described by the node, a public source is preferred but not always required. The person should explicitly state what may be published. These changes can update public-facing biography, location, roles, links and relationships, while the private conversation remains internal provenance.

Preferred correction outcomes are precise: fix a bio sentence, downgrade deshi to influence, remove an unsupported edge, add a source link, split two incorrectly merged identities, hide a private detail, or mark a candidate as source-only. Broad claims without public sources or explicit self-report consent should be parked for review rather than applied directly.

Methodology