Nawa-ato

What is nawa-ato?

Nawa-ato is the term for the marks that rope leaves on the skin: red or white lines in the pattern of the wraps, which stay visible for a few hours to a day after a session. The word is made up of nawa (rope) and ato (trace, mark). Many rope bottoms see nawa-ato as a valued souvenir.

What the Japanese itself says about it

More than you would expect, and not about the skin.

The Digital Daijisen has no entry 縄跡, but it does have 縄目 (nawame), with three meanings: the knot in a rope, the pattern that comes from pressing rope into the wall of pottery, and being captured and tied by an opponent. The Nihon Kokugo Daijiten adds to that third meaning the shame that went with it, with a source from the Genpei Jōsuiki of the early fourteenth century.

So the Japanese word for a rope mark has carried a second layer for centuries: a mark of rope is a trace of having been bound, and that was something to be ashamed of. That in the rope scene it is precisely something to be proud of is exactly the reversal shibari lives on.

When a mark is something else

As soon as feeling is involved instead of color.

Khodulev and colleagues describe in Cureus that brief tingling and numbness in the hand were often reported by their participants and usually dismissed as unimportant, because nothing was left of it. But numbness on the back of the hand together with weakness in extending the wrist and fingers belongs in another category: that is a failure of the radial nerve. Citing older research into handcuffs, they name fifteen minutes as the shortest time in which acute numbness or loss of strength has arisen.

The rule of thumb that follows is short. A mark you only see is a mark. A mark you feel something at, or can no longer feel through, is a reason to take the rope off and have a doctor look at it.

Where this fits on this site

How long something stays visible and where on the body is one of the things we discuss beforehand; not everyone can turn up at the office the next morning with lines. The page on the BDSM date shows how that prior conversation goes.

Sources

• 縄目（なわめ）. Kotobank, with the entries from the Digital Daijisen (Shogakukan) and the Seisenban Nihon Kokugo Daijiten. Yields the three meanings of 縄目: the knot in a rope, the pattern made by pressing rope against the surface of pottery, and being captured and tied with rope by an enemy; the Nihon Kokugo Daijiten adds that it also denotes the disgrace of such treatment, with a source from the Genpei Jōsuiki (early fourteenth century), and names as a third meaning the strands of a twisted rope or a pattern resembling them. It also yields, because there is no entry 縄跡, the finding that nawa-ato is scene Japanese and not a dictionary word.
• Acute Radial Compressive Neuropathy: The Most Common Injury Induced by Japanese Rope Bondage. Khodulev, Klimko, Charnenka et al., Cureus 15(5), e39588, 2023. Yields that brief numbness and tingling in the hand were often reported by participants but given little weight because they left no lasting failure, that the affected people reported numbness on the back of the wrist together with weakness up to full paralysis of the extensor muscles of wrist and fingers, and the note, citing earlier research into handcuffs, that fifteen minutes is the shortest reported time in which acute numbness or loss of strength arose.

Related terms

Nawa-ato is what is left after shibari, the page where the whole practice is.

• Bruising. The heavier variant of a trace, with color instead of relief.
• Marking. Deliberately leaving traces, and what you can and cannot read from them.
• Aftercare. What is needed right after untying, even when there are only lines.
• Asanawa. The rope that makes these marks, and why the thickness matters.