Gote shibari

What is gote shibari?

Gote shibari (Japanese: 後手縛り, English: box tie) is the Japanese tie in which the arms are secured behind the back, usually with wraps around the chest and upper arms as well. 後手 literally means “back hand”, so hands on the back. It is the tie most Japanese ropework begins with, and the one the rest is built on.

Gote or takate kote?

Two words, largely the same tie. Osada Steve, who runs the Osada-ryu in Tokyo, writes that gote and takatekote are both used for the plain box tie, and that this tie is one of the most important building blocks of shibari. Gote (後手) for him is literally “back hand”. Takatekote (高手小手) is “high hand, small hand”: forearms bound diagonally upward. Neither word says anything about wraps around the torso. That sits in the use, not in the name.

The name does say where the rope should lie. Kote in kendo is the forearm part, and that is where the first wrap of a gote belongs too. Osada Steve brings the elbows toward each other for that, so the wrists do not end up opposite each other; rope on the wrists themselves, he says, produces discomfort and pain. The encyclopedia on Japanese bondage calls the complete form the basis of most shibari ties, with the upper body and arms caught behind the back in a “U”.

Why almost every session starts here

Because one tie handles the most at once. The hands are secured, the arms cannot come forward, and the torso immediately gets the framework the rest of the evening hangs on.

For the person being tied, the feeling sits not in the wrists but in the shoulders. You can no longer get your arms in front of you, and a body notices that sooner than the head does. For the person tying, the tie can be shifted: higher, tighter, or roomy enough for half an hour.

This is also exactly the tie the medical literature has recorded the most nerve damage around.

What you watch for

The middle third of the upper arm. Khodulev and colleagues describe in Cureus ten people with nerve injury after Japanese rope bondage, noting that in those cases the hands were often bound in a box tie, with the rope in the middle third of the upper arm. In 90 percent of them it was the radial nerve. They reported numbness on the back of the hand and loss of strength in the extensors of the wrist and fingers, from mild weakness to full paralysis.

So during the tying, ask for the fingers to be extended and not squeezed, because those extensors are the first to drop out. Release as soon as the back of the hand goes numb.

Where this fits on this site

If you want to know how such a tie feels without taking a course for it yourself, that belongs to a BDSM date. That page sets out what is discussed beforehand and how far the rope goes that evening.

Sources

• Acute Radial Compressive Neuropathy: The Most Common Injury Induced by Japanese Rope Bondage. Khodulev, Klimko, Charnenka, Zharko & Khoduleva, Cureus 15(5): e39588, 2023. Provides the finding that in the described cases the hands were often bound in a box tie with the rope in the middle third of the upper arm, the share of 90 percent for the radial nerve, and the symptom picture of numbness on the back of the hand with loss of strength in the extensors of the wrist and fingers, from mild weakness to full paralysis.
• Gote (後手) vs Takatekote (高手小手). Osada Steve, osada-ryu.com. Bakushi and head of the Osada-ryu school in Tokyo, who teaches this tie professionally. Provides the finding that gote and takatekote are the two common words for the same box tie, the literal meanings “back hand” and “high hand, small hand”, the note that neither word says anything about torso wraps, the origin of kote as forearm from kendo, and the advice to bring the elbows toward each other so the rope does not land on the wrists.
• Japanese bondage. Wikipedia. Provides the description of the ushiro takate kote as the base form of most shibari ties, which catches the upper body and arms behind the back in a “U”. Several neighboring paragraphs of the article carry a citation-needed request of their own; it is used here only for those two points.

Related terms

• Bondage. The umbrella term gote shibari is one of the classic ties within.
• Chest bondage. The upper-body tie that is almost always laid on top of a gote.
• Double column tie. The small tie that brings the forearms together in a gote.
• Single column tie. The base tie the gote, according to the encyclopedia, also is, with the torso as the column.
• Friction. What keeps the wraps of a gote in place without a knot.
• Asanawa. The hemp rope this tie is usually laid with.
• Floorwork. The context a gote is laid in most often, without a suspension point.
• Shibari. The tradition the gote is the base form of.
• Takate kote. The same tie under the other name, with the find that 高手小手 is an ordinary Japanese four-letter word.
• TK. The abbreviation you meet on workshop notes and in rope groups, and where it comes from.