I am at a rope bar in Tokyo’s red-light district a few years ago, just before the pandemic hit the planet. The room is tiny, a bar with a handful of seats and two tatamis arranged as a tying spot. SM accessories, vintage porn posters and a collection of cosplay dresses and kimonos clutter the walls. It doesn’t get more real than this, after all the symbolic stories about Japanese rope bondage. The entrance fee is expensive, but it includes all you can eat and drink for the night, and most customers stay all night. I know the bartender and owner by now, and he happily greets me for coming back.

I’m there with a lover. We randomly met in Bali a few years ago, and for some reason, chance has it that we are in Tokyo at the same time. She is the rootless wild child, travelling the world alone since her late teens. Her behaviour is far from the traditional submissive norms that Japanese women are supposed to embody. We have rented a room for the night at the cheesy love hotel around the corner, as I am staying in the countryside far outside Tokyo. It reminds me of my years working in Japan, spending entire nights out drinking and singing karaoke with my colleagues, and only sleeping a few hours at a train station shuttle hotel or in an internet cafe private room before going back to the office in the morning.

On this particular night, I made a date with Nuit de Tokyo, a Frenchman legend in the kinbaku scene from studying with many of the now-dying great teachers. You know him from the chapter of Being Bakushi. He is giving me a private lesson, even if he wouldn’t say that; he comes from a generation when shibari is ‘stolen’ and not taught. So we will spend time together, talk, drink and eat, and maybe do some rope, and perhaps I’ll steal some tiny bits of knowledge from him.

What You Wear Is What You Are

My lover, being a punk backpacker, wears her Doc Martins and an oversized hoodie. Obviously, she is very far from the traditional images of a secretary, schoolgirl or geisha. So my friend suggests that maybe she should borrow one of the outfits hanging on the wall waiting to be selected like the geishas-for-hire in that second-floor brothel down the street. Just to be more comfortable on the tatami floor. She picks a flowery silk kimono and starts to undress in the middle of the bar. It’s a kinky rope bar, and we are all sex-positive kinksters, after all. But no, she is quickly directed towards the toilet to have privacy.

Nuit de Tokyo helps her properly arrange the kimono to cover her neck, wrists, ankles and collar bones as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world to do. And this is where my thievery starts. As the most senior person in the room, he shows that being correctly dressed is the way to be. I add a mental note to my collection of treasuries from the night. He could be directly out of a business meeting with his nice suit and casually loosened tie. However, no one suggests that he undress to be comfortable on the floor. In comparison, except for her panties under the smooth silk fabric, she is naked—only a thin barrier protecting her vulnerability.

We have a drink and snacks while we casually talk. My lover is getting more and more silent, retreating into her experience. I’m sure that she can feel the coldness from the metal barstool. Another ten minutes pass. “Now you can tie her”, he says to me. And we move over to the tatamis. As we get more intimate, she can feel the heat from my body radiating compared to the room that suddenly feels so much colder. The silky fabric moves on her body as my rope wraps around her. Randomly or by faith, a tiny inch of skin is revealed. “Look what beautiful skin she has”, he comments. The bartender and I examine her, and she blushes.

It’s masterfully directed, just like a scene in the theatre. By asking her to wear the kimono. By telling her to dress in the bathroom. By everyone else being dressed so differently. And she loves it. She feels safe and vulnerable at the same time. She has everyone’s attention. The situation would be completely different if she had started naked. Then there wouldn’t have been an opportunity to torturously slowly remove the clothing and expose the skin to the metal bar stool. Tying rope is like telling a story; so is undressing your partner. The transformation from safely covered to vulnerably exposed is the point. The movement from point A to B. And that makes a tiny revealed inch of bare skin so much more erotic than the fully naked body.

What We See Is What Matters

A concept commonly discussed in feminist philosophy is ‘the male gaze’. This has been exhaustively described in books like Roslyn Wallach Bologh’s book about Max Weber and Klaus Theweleit’s book about Male Fantasies (1979). This idea of using one’s position of power to turn others into objects of pleasure and denying them the opportunity to compete in the patriarchal society. There is an excellent meme (that I can’t find anymore) about ‘what if a kinkster would sexualize their workplace, in a kinky way, as vanilla people do in their ordinary way’. Like ordering a project manager to pull down their pants and bend over after a late delivery. Or ball gagging a dull middle manager for talking too much during meetings. And this is what I muse about over and over again, that consciously and consensually playing with these social dynamics makes us more resilient against them in everyday life.

Part of establishing a power dynamic is controlling what is in focus. It can be done crudely by using pain or pleasure to direct attention. Or simply by moving the gaze and the most gentle touch of the fingertips. Sometimes even touching is unnecessary, but the presence, moisture and heat radiating from a hand hovering just above skin contact are enough. The smaller the area, the more intense the experience, in my experience. Like the sensitive skin of the neck, wrists and collarbone that Nuit de Tokyo was careful to keep covered that night in Tokyo, only to later expose them again with complete focus.

Finally, here is a book recommendation to plunge even deeper into this theme:. German writer Hans Peter Duerr’s Der Mythos vom Zivilisationsprozeß (1999). It roughly translates to ‘Myths about the Civilizing Process’. In short, the author criticises the idea that humanity started as wild and shameless and then created civilization to tame our animal behaviours. There is a chapter in the book about nudity and shame and how it establishes private space in indigenous tribes living closely and mostly naked together. He contrasts that with our modern society which shamelessly capitalises on sex. The art of undressing is a ritual of stepping into a more private realm. It doesn’t really matter what symbolism one uses, in the naked tribes, two lovers would bring freshly cut branches into the communal sleeping hut to separate their sleeping spot before love making. Through sadomasochistic play, I have learnt when to look at my partner as a piece of meat to be ravaged, and when to see them as a shoulder to cry on, or as a co-pilot on an adventure. Because in an intimate relationship, they are all of these, just maybe not all at once.