Seiu Ito

Seiu Ito is “The Father of Kinbaku”. Specifically, he was a Japanese painter who displayed great imagination, honesty, and creativity. Actually, Ito conjured things that many of us couldn’t even imagine today.

Kinbaku means “tight binding” and it is a Japanese style of bondage. Actually, it involves tying a person up using visually intricate patterns with ropes made of jute and hemp.

Seiu Ito is the “Father of Kinbaku”. First, he started studying Hojojustsu. Then, he transformed it to Kinbaku with his drawings and paintings. His work became a great example that showed Japanese sexual fantasies exposed as more traditional media. Where Bondage as a sexual activity came to notice in Japan at the end of the Edo Period.
Hajime Ito was his given first name, who he changed to Seiu Ito at the age of thirteen. Seiu around that time started drawing images of women bound in rope known as the erotic Japanese art of Kinbaku. Ito was an artist who introduced 20th-century concepts to the 19th-century ideals, where his inspiration came from the kabuki teacher and Hojojustsu.

Seiu Ito techniques come from the Edo Period tortures. Actually, his technique was to bind his models with rope in different ways, sometimes attaching them to other devices or hanging them upside down. Then, he would take photographs of the model tied up and use them as inspiration for his paintings.

By the 1930s, the Japanese government banned some artistic types and censored print media, which included the work of Seiu Ito. Then, in 1945, heavy bombers of the US Air Force dropped around 1700 tons of incendiary bombs on the eastern half of Tokyo. Since Seiu Ito’s home was there, most of his work was destroyed. Consequently, this left Ito with a struggle to survive as an artist. Later, the work that survived helped him solidify Ito’s title as the “Father of Kinbaku”.

Image: Camerettasabauda