Kinbaku means tight binding, while Kinbaku-bi literally means the beauty of tight binding. Kinbaku is a Japanese style of bondage which involves tying a person up using simple yet visually intricate patterns, usually with several pieces of thin rope long. In Japanese, this natural-fibre rope is known as asanawa, the Japanese vocabulary does not make a distinction between hemp and jute.
The allusion is to the use of hemp rope for restraining prisoners, as a symbol of power, in the same way that stocks or manacles are used in a Western bondage context. The word shibari came into common use in the West at some point in the 1990s to describe the bondage art Kinbaku. Shibari is a Japanese word that broadly means binding or tying in most contexts, but is used to refer to this style of decorative bondage.
