The big name behind making shibari popular is the Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki. I don’t recall when he began to be popular in the West but it doesn’t take half a brain to see that he was probably the number one person responsible for popularizing this fetish, and then fetishists in the west picked up on this bizarre Japanese tradition and started using it for their own pleasure (and pain). And porn. It’s a bit odd that Araki became as popular as he did, in some ways. Sure the photography is good but he is insanely prolific and very repetitive. And while some of his stuff is the “art” of kinbaku like this one,
a lot of it is rather explicit like this one, with blowjobs and a fish next to the pussy. I get it, Nobu.
