Japanese bondage

Kinbaku (緊縛) means 'tight binding Kinbaku-bi (緊縛美) which literally means 'the beauty of tight binding'. Kinbaku (also Sokubaku, bakujojutsu, and senyojo jutsu) is a Japanese style of bondage or BDSM which involves tying up the bottom using simple yet visually intricate patterns, usually with several pieces of thin rope–often jute and generally around 6 mm in diameter, but sometimes as small as 4mm, and between 7m-8m long). In Japanese, this rope is known as 'asanawa'. The Japanese vocabulary does not make a distinction between hemp and jute. Dictionaries will usually translate the word 'asa' as hemp and 'nawa' as rope. However, this rope is not hemp rope, but jute rope: the allusion is to the use of hemp rope for restraining prisoners, as a symbol of power. In Japan very few bondage practitioners, if any, use hemp rope. Though jute and hemp may belong to the same family of fibers, and they both have good properties for holding knots and for not stretching, they do differ in looks, weight and especially in smell.^{[citation needed]}
 
The word shibari came into common use in the West at some point in the 1990s to describe the bondage art Kinbaku. Shibari (縛り) is a Japanese word that literally means "to tie" or "to bind". It is used in Japan to describe the artful use of twine to tie objects or packages.