Tokyo, baby talk, and deepening my practice as a kinbaku artist

I had a weird epiphany during a day-long shibari session.  I had spent the day outside of language.  At least any language I am able to speak.  Japanese is not a language I can speak, but it occupies a weird place in my psyche.

My first language was Japanese.  Baby talk.  I had a Japanese nanny.  My parents were totally absent, and so from the cradle, even whilst still in the cradle, I was raised by a Japanese woman who as far as I know did not speak English.  My parents spoke to her in Japanese.  Yes, my parents spoke Japanese.  Both of them.

They lived in Japan before, during, and after my birth.  I would have been born in Japan but my mother was so afraid she would die during my birth, as she had nearly done with my much older next sibling, that she went home by ship to be with her parents and to give birth to me in the same hospital that my next older sibling had been born in.

Neither baby nor mother suffered any adverse consequences.  And six weeks after I was born, we flew back to Japan.  I went to Japanese nursery school.  When I was four, we moved to the US, but my Japanese nanny came with, and stayed with us until I was five, and was deemed no longer in need of a nanny.  Little did they know!

It is slightly off-piste, but many readers will know that I love being a baby.  This is connected to being raised by nannies and maids, and is also why when I am feeling submissive, it is to nannies, babysitters, and maids that I love to submit more than anything else.  The puzzled escort I brought home I think was really perplexed until she got into it, that I wanted to be tucked into bed as if I were her little sister.

If you don’t speak Japanese, you will largely be outside of language as most Japanese. don’t speak English.  Personally, I love this.  Trying to figure out what is going on is a great puzzle and is very stimulating.

But just because I couldn’t understand them, didn’t meant that my sensei and the model and the interpreter weren’t talking all the time.  I loved how a five-minute explanation in Japanese was translated as a single sentence into English.  I think the nuance was lost, but funnily enough, from the tone and from the odd word I could recognise, sometimes I knew what they were saying.

I find that whenever I am outside of language for a long period of time like this, I begin to want to speak in Italian most usually, or if it feels more alien, in Spanish.  I think my brain is simply processing “foreign” and Italian comes easiest, but when it is really different, Spanish comes out instead.  There is no rational process taking place here, it just comes out that way.  That’s what happened in Thailand when I was with the Thai, or with the group of Russian-speaking shibari teachers I was working with.  My answer to their Russian was Italian…and my answer to the Thai was in Spanish.

But with the Japanese, that isn’t what happened.  What came out was baby talk.  Not in a sissy, mincing way, but in a way of making Japanese sounding words that were not really Japanese, or were only partially Japanese.  And the first time it happened, I was saying exactly what my teacher had said, and I did it as I brough the model into my arms, squeezing her with the rope, and as it came out, they all laughed, not at me, but because it was a genuine connection.  They understood me, I understood them.  And it kept happening.

And I realised that what was going on was the triggering of deep memory, of being a baby in Japan, of listening to Japanese spoken all day, and it coming back out of me as the kind of Japanese a four-year old can speak.  

The other thing that was going on, and which was a first for me, was that I was becoming very aroused by my tying.  I tie people all the time.  But in part because the only way I could speak to these women was through the rope and through baby talk, and because they were also not at all submissive, but were making me really learn how to dominate them through the rope, the energy was intense.

I loved it.  It was an incredible learning experience in ways that all of the many classes I do in Europe and the US never are.  Not to say that there is anything wrong with those other classes…it was just that the energy of this was so different.  And it felt good.  Felt good in a way that being a top, a domme, has never felt before.  And I like that, as I am leaning into it.

As a one-year old woman from a body perspective, discovering what is deeply arousing and what barely blips, is a voyage.  I am not turned on by all the same things, but have not yet fully learned what really does it for me.  So finding this was beautiful.

And what was my teacher teaching me?  Very little about the technical skills of rope handling.  Very little.  Just enough. And anyway, that knowledge, though hard to do well, and requiring of much practice, is relatively easy to come by, as there are many people who teach it.  What isn’t easy is the “simple” part of transmitting energy through rope.

An example exercise.  

“You cannot touch her [the model] with your hands.  Only rope.  Show her, with one rope only, that you are owner, and that she is your pet.  You have ten minutes, and at the end of it, she should feel very strongly that she wants to be your pet.”

I found this difficult.  Very.

We did the same exercise with me as a dominatrix.  I found this less difficult, but still challenging.

And then my sensei showed me.  Showed me a glimpse of what is possible.  And I learned, and did it again.

“Much better.”

This is what we did all day.  And when I noted that the second model I was working with was inert, totally unresponsive, they explained to me, “she is wating for you.  She is very experienced.  She is watching you.  Seeing how you handle the rope, seeing if you know what you are doing, seeing if you are enough for her.”  It made me feel useless and incompetent. But also inspired and grateful that they were not pulling the punches and stroking me ego, but teaching me. It just happens that she is the number one muse of one of the most famous kinbaku artists in the world. I allowed myself to sink into a form ego death to feel her energy and to learn from the three women in the room, for even the interpreter present was a kinbaku model.

But when my teacher explained that it was a bit like resistance, on purpose, so that I would assert my dominance, and show her my dominance through the rope, I began to understand.

I don’t think I have ever learned so much in one day of shibari than on this one, and I have had several private lessons and group lessons with my sensei, and many with other teachers.  This was next level, mainly because we focussed on the tiniest of details, the smallest of gestures, and of getting things exactly right—the tension, no, tie it again, and again, and again, until it is perfect.  The knots, the same.  The way I hold the rope, the same.

Drilling down.

I was very aware that I had been given the chance to play with two Ferraris that day, two of the world’s most sought after and experienced Shibari models, and of course, I do not have the skill to honour them properly.  Perhaps one day I will.  But learning from them as much as from my sensei, was invaluable.  It sets the bar, sets the level of aspiration.

As I find my voice in rope, I turn to many teachers, but there is a common thread.  It is a style of rope that is about the energy transmission. I will learn the technical skills, but more and more, I will learn how to convey a style which is mine.  Both models said they felt safe and relaxed in my rope, that it was therapeutic.  And my sensei has encouraged me to continue using my body as I do, describing it as my “super-power” in that I can literally envelope someone, or reach both their neck and their ankles with my natural arm span.

I am told that it feels like more than one person is working on them, and that this feeling is disorienting, in a good way, as they don’t know anymore where I am or what is going to happen—which causes them to let go more easily, to give up on trying to anticipate.

Am I good?  Not yet.  But I will be.  And in the meantime, I am discounting sessions for clients who want to be in rope. More practice is the way ahead.