Report August 2025

Personal reflections – it started with a skin reaction, and I sought to find the cause – JBO-content rope I’d boiled, dried under tension, and processed using jojoba oil and beeswax. At that time there was still some JBO-free rope from somewhere in Japan, and Aoi Sayo in Osaka made me a beautiful set out of it. But that seemed about the last of it, and it disappeared around 2012.

With no more available, Ero Ouji taught me how to soak JBO-rope overnight in cold sake – the alcohol does something different to the fibre. Then dry under tension, singe, coat in Bayu (horse oil), lightly tsubaki oil, rub in beeswax and heat it in. It was hellish expensive, enormously timeconsuming, and not favourable with younger, western tying partners. The rope wasn’t perfect, but probably not possible to improve. I still wanted to match, even better that earlier set.

I’m a product and process development engineer with a fair amount of intellectual property under my belt. I’d been mentored in Japanese business etiquette by the presidents of two corporations in Tokyo and Chiba-ken – a fortuitous advantage. I spent years visiting rope manufacturers and yarn mills, gaining knowledge, making slow improvements. Not without many pitfalls and hurdles.

Upstream, on sale-no-return supply, 5,000kg natural yarn was dumped in 2017, being so far out of specification and with too many impurities to make rope. We did get another delivery, but found greater pliable jute twisted on modern general purpose machinery generates flaws.

The next year 5,000kg each of red and black was trashed because the yarn had been dyed after manufacture, so its count variation (effectively diameter) was so far out of tolerance and made lumpy rope unacceptable to release onto the market. When jute fibre is processed with liquid it gets absorbed through the hemicellulose cell walls into the sponge-like middle lamela. The fibre bloats ~22% and shortens. If it dries without tension, it stays fat, but becomes lighter and significantly weaker.

After another 5,000kg was cut with cheap Meshta fibre, making it prickly like fibreglass, 12,000kg yarn ordered in January from a third party mill consistently failed 7 rounds of quality control and was cancelled. We don’t know if our downpayment will be reimbursed. External yarn supply is extremely risky – nothing short of nightmarish, and explains, apart from seasonal differences in fibre why it has been historically so difficult to get consistency in rope supply.

But there is good news. After decades of unreliable yarn supply, our Japanese partners invested in their own state-of-the-art mill. It went operational November 2024, and ever since we’ve been testing and trialing different raw materials, hackling, soybean oil content, counts, filament length and content, and twist settings. We’re homing in on a repeatable, consistent quality, compressibility (softness), longitudinal strength, count tolerance, and the ability to twist rope at a looser lay. It will result in a totally new yarn developed and designed specifically for Shibari.

Weather conditions for Tossa jute cultivation have been favourable. It’s expected to be an excellent year. Cropping is underway, and delivery of raw material should arrive later this month. Demand is expected to be very high, especially for premium quality fibre, and prices will reflect this. Fortunately, having yarn now made in our own mill should mitigate the costs so we can maintain prices, and finally have total quality control oversight over the entire production, and importantly, consistency. It’s a massive breakthrough.

You can’t make good rope from bad yarn because it’s such an integral component to ropemaking. Low quality fibre batched with mineral white petroleum JBO becomes stunted, making it unyielding (it doesn’t compress as much; not so squishy), so to regain softness you have to use loosely laid horticultural ‘heavy twines’ intended for securing fruit saplings once, and then left to biodegrade. Used for Shibari it loses stability more readily, becomes easy to damage in handling, and is far more cumbersome and costly to process.

Premium grade fibre VOT batched with soybean oil comes with many obstacles to discover and rectify. Not least being the inherent softness; squashiness which, if twisted too loose generates compression waves and flaws through machine tooling. We’ve had to learn, and find methods to overcome this. Raw it appears just as hairy as the JBO-content rope. But the good news is how easy it is to condition.