We’re living in an age were we wake up every day to an Internet connected life. We love, we eat, we meet each other and many of our activities are shared to friends and strangers at some certain degree through the biggest communicational network in the history ever. Some habits have been changing since some time ago with the growing appearance of smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices. People’s hyperconnectivity is growing by the day. Internet has became the “human condition” amplifier box. It magnifies everything without distinction, both the correct, the good the worthwhile, and also the bad, the malicious, the deceiving or the misleading things.
This paradigmatic place is were most underground culture movements feel comfortable with for their communication debate and even learning. In this space identities are mostly virtual, and only a few people would be able to personally restate what they virtually write or teach. In this space anonymity would become both a blessing or trap. Shibari Kinbaku community is not unfamiliar to this fact that sometimes misleads concepts, overcoming what is true with what is popular without taking into account the origins of the information or the veracity of that piece of information.
I’ve heard many times that the perception of a certain concept depends on the observer’s point of view. I was thinking in that fact while I recalled “the blind men and the elephant allegory“:
Once upon a time, there lived six blind men in a village. One day the villagers told them,
“Hey, there is an elephant in the village today.”
They had no idea what an elephant is. They decided, “Even though we would not be able to see it, let us go and feel it anyway.” All of them went where the elephant was. Everyone of them touched the elephant.
“Hey, the elephant is a pillar,” said the first man who touched his leg.
“Oh, no! it is like a rope,” said the second man who touched the tail.
“Oh, no! it is like a thick branch of a tree,” said the third man who touched the trunk of the elephant.
“It is like a big hand fan” said the fourth man who touched the ear of the elephant.
“It is like a huge wall,” said the fifth man who touched the belly of the elephant.
“It is like a solid pipe,” Said the sixth man who touched the tusk of the elephant.
After that they began to argue about the elephant and everyone of them insisted that he was right.
I’ve realized then that it is in this same way that many people may have incomplete or inexact concepts of what Shibari Kinbaku is, just based in the comfortable behavior of believing whatever they read in Internet. There are many people that think of what they read from an Internet page as an absolute truth, either based on it’s popularity or any unknown algorithm that may include page hits without caring about the veracity or the page’s information background. It should be the same readers who should chose the more reliable sources against the others, and through that behavior they’d drive popularity closer to reliability. Unfortunately this does not happen all the times. People rarely takes the effort to double check the sources of information and tends to believe whoever was able to achieve a huge audience behind, despite the method they used to do so. Under this paradigm there is a growing culture of “easiness” and “popular information” under the motto of “living the Shibari the way you feel it”. This leads to as many versions of what Shibari is as there are persons trying to live it in an self taught way. This should not be a bad idea, unless you completely lose the original point of this art. In that way, every time I come across a popular photo with lots of likes in any social network, I make the personal exercise to read again what some Great Masters like Akechi Denki, Arisue Go, Yukimura Haruki, Naka Akire or Osada Steve had said about Shibari Kinbaku, then I look again to the picture and search in that portrayed scene: Where is the communication? Were is the rigger’s focus at that moment? What is the rigger intending to show us?
Understanding Japanese art is not an easy task. Besides visiting the island a couple of times you need to get embedded with their culture so to be able to understand their very concepts of beauty, harmony, simplicity and even the ritualistic view of ropes their culture has. You have to be wise on what to read and what to discard. You have to be able to choose those authors that are also embedded into Japanese culture and open your heart and mind to concepts so far from our traditional western culture and conception that may sound too fundamentalists to our mind. What’s true is that any Japanese art worth to be learned is never exempt from an important amount of tradition that usually shows the difference between those simple imitators and those who have a very personal implication in what we’re doing. Denying this important component in what we do makes it clear that we are up to the form rather than the substance, more focused on what shines and shows rather than the feelings. It’s upon this analysis that we can understand the real meaning and how Osada Steve’s words apply when he said:
“… What I don’t appreciate are people who classify their ties as Shibari, when in fact their ties are reverse-engineered Japanese-inspired bondages. In my book, someone who has never been to Japan, someone who has never directly studied under any genuine Japanese Shibari practitioner (read: someone with a traceable lineage to one of the Shibari dynasties in Japan), someone who takes his knowledge from a picture on the Internet, or from watching a Japanese SM porn video, or from having attended a workshop that was mislabeled as a Shibari lecture, would be better off not making a fool of himself. Such a person should better describe his bondage in English words, perhaps as Japanese-inspired bondage, with emphasis on inspired….”
If you pay close attention to those who really know about Shibari Kinbaku and are living legends of this ancient art, you may notice they have a completely different relation with this worldwide network. They have understood that Internet is like a good shop window were they want to be showing their works, communicating events and performances, offering their face to face tuition. But you may have also noticed (if you already didn’t you really should..) that no one of them had ever offered any kind of tuition or spread any tutorial through Internet. All what you may have found after some thoroughly search are certain kind of clarification of some misunderstood theoretical concept they wanted to clarify and share with the rope community.
There is an unspoken saying between Japanese Masters and all those who had achieved a certain degree of prestige in any Japanese art that tells us that those who know, do not share.
Zen Buddhists have always been wary of the pitfalls of language and consider it the greatest obstacle to real understanding. The phrase Furyu monji (literally “not standing on words or letters”)denotes the Zen concept that no deep understanding can be transferred by the spoken word:
“Those who do not know speak, those who know speak not.”
Trying to explain the path to enlightenment is as futile as trying to catch the reflection of the moon in a pond, and there is a tradition in Zen of maintaining ambiguity so that the mind does not get trapped focusing on the wrong thing.
(Wabi Sabi The Japanese Art of Impermanence - Andrew Juniper)
By being faithful to the original Japanese way of learning, Great Masters of Shibari had learned through the tough and long way of the Deshi, following closely their masters for years, and thus capturing not only the mere technique but the essence, the soul and the cultural background of this amazing art.
In that way we found ourselves nowadays (in the same way we portrayed at the blind men and the elephant story) with many different versions of what Shibari. Each one may be different depending on who speaks about it. Each one may develop a group of fans who would blindly follow and defend what they think they saw. Each one sees Shibari Kinbaku in their own way, but only a few, a very small group, would see it in a holistic and complete way, closely enough to what this represents to Japanese people.
Only those who had let themselves drink the knowledge from the original birth fountain, traveling not once but many times to Japan, letting themselves be touched by their rites, uses and traditions, and trying to open their mind enough to know what this art means for the Japanese people, are ready to start the journey of Shibari Kinbaku as Japanese people lives it.
Others my simply remain in their rigid concepts and fight to enforce their personal portion of truth, completely forgetting the global harmony this art proposes, and remaining in a simple version of a westernized rope art with certain Japanese like affection.
