"Shibari is 90% emotional. The other half is technical."
Following our earlier article about Steve Osada's online Japanese rope bondage learning platform, Kinbaku Academy, we sat down with the rope master for a conversation about his career and the state of shibari/kinbaku today.
Steve Osada (also often referred to using the Japanese name order, Osada Steve) inherited the Osada name in 2001 from grandmaster Eikichi Osada when he died. They had first met in 1998 for a photo shoot and Steve eventually started helping the grandmaster with his weekly shows as a pulley operator. The rest, as ...
Tenga is not only one of the top adult brands in Japan, it is also one of the most savvy in terms of its marketing strategies. It is known for adopting headline-grabbing, viral publicity tactics, not least launching a rocket into space.
But sometimes these are more sincere.
Tenga has provided a gamer called Jeni (or Shunya Hatakeyama) with sex toys after the brand heard that he uses Tenga toys to cushion his homemade chin controller. Jeni has muscular dystrophy and uses his chin to operate a stick for playing games. He has been a wheelchair user since second grade and finds empowerment in ...
Halloween is well and truly back. And that means plenty of flesh on display in Shibuya.
Since Friday, the Tokyo district has been packed each night with cosplayers massing for the impromptu cosplay street party that has defined Tokyo Halloween for several years.
In an effort to control the phenomenon, which has resurged this year almost for the first, full time since the Covid pandemic, Shibuya has temporarily banned drinking on the street. The police presence is significant, of course, after the minor unrest in 2018 that led to a truck being overturned in Center Gai. This means hundreds of ...
Gotta catch them all!
Well, there are so many Pokémon that that aspiration is surely impossible. But it seems you can catch the important ones.
Satoshi not only caught Pikachu, but was spotted giving Pikachu a good kiss.
Namely, a guy dressed as Satoshi (Ash Ketchum in the West) was recently seen kissing a lady friend dressed as Pikachu in a backstreet of Shibuya.
The young couple, presumably at the end of a successful date, were surreptitiously filmed in an alleyway exploring each other's faces. The four-second video subsequently uploaded to Twitter on October 24 has gone viral. The ...
Dating websites and apps were big before but are even bigger now, no doubt influenced by the pandemic that made it harder to do the usual things like go to nightclubs, konpa group dates, or even your school campus to hook up with someone.
There are many such apps on the Japanese market: Tapple, with, Dine, Pairs, Omiai, and more.
We're not sure if it's the local market leader based on current user numbers, but Tinder must be the most famous because of its overseas prevalence and the money it spends on advertising (even recruiting Kiko Mizuhara to front its campaign).
Its just gave a big ...
Following its recent interview with pink film softcore porn star Chisa Hasegawa, the awesome Substack blog-newsletter Tokyo Calling has put out another cracker -- and we are very jealous. We don't know how Gianni Simone pulled it off but he managed to land an interview with a genuine soapland worker, and it's a sensitive and enlightening read.
Accompanied by photos by Eric Rechsteiner, the intrepid Simone pays a visit to one of the many soaplands (a kind of bathhouse-style brothel) in Senzoku, the Tokyo area formerly known as Yoshiwara -- the city's most popular and renowned red-light ...
Kinbaku (shibari) rope bondage sensei Steve Osada, formerly known as the photographer Dr D Vice, is the inheritor of the Osada name and tying style (Osada-ryu) from Eikichi Osada.
The late master is one of the people responsible for making kinbaku known in the mainstream. He staged his first kinbaku performance at a ballet school in Asagaya, Tokyo, in 1965, which ushered the previously hidden world of rope bondage into the open. He subsequently moved his performance act to the strip show venue circuit in the late 1970s. In the 1980s, he did many shows with pink movie legend Hiromi Saotome, ...
At Tokyo Kinky, we hope we don't moralize. We like to stay as open as possible, even -- and perhaps especially -- when the tastes do not match our own. And given the kind of content we share, we are hardly qualified to get on a high horse and start preaching to the masses.
As such, it is with a touch of bemusement that we are watching a dispute unfold, first on Twitter and now in the mainstream media.
An article titled "I am not alone -- we are all alone: Using masturbation as an ethnographic method in research on shota subculture in Japan" appeared in the respected academic journal ...
Feti Fes is Japan's top fetish festival. We have attended before and previously posted photo reports that readers seemed to like.
It's the kind of event where every little room, cubbyhole, or booth is dedicated to a whole other fetish. Participants include chika (underground) and gravure idols, ero-cosplayers, fetish service providers, and goods and merchandise retailers.
After postponement due to the pandemic -- obviously, given the nature of the event, it's hardly compatible with social distancing guidelines -- Feti Fes 19 was finally held in April. We were not able to attend but, as we ...
Remember the awesome dinosaur-themed love hotel in Machida, Tokyo, we wrote about last autumn? It looks like it was seriously damaged by fire recently.
On the evening of June 9, flames were seen coming from the roof of the dino-inspired Hotel Artia, making it look even more like a scene from Jurassic Park than it did before. Social media was flooded with pics taken from cars traveling along the nearby expressway.
The cause was reportedly the wooden sauna located on the roof of the hotel.
No injuries or fatalities resulted from the fire. Moreover, no damage to the main structure of the ...
