Kinbaku (緊縛?) means "tight binding," while Kinbaku-bi (緊縛美?) literally means "the beauty of tight binding." Kinbaku is a Japanese style of bondage or BDSM which involves tying a person up using simple yet visually intricate patterns, usually with several pieces of thin rope (often jute, hemp or linen and generally around 6 mm in diameter, but sometimes as small as 4 mm, and between 7 – 8 m long). In Japanese, this natural-fibre rope is known as asanawa (麻縄?); the Japanese vocabulary does not make a distinction between hemp and jute. The allusion is to the use of hemp rope for restraining prisoners, as a symbol of power, in the same way that stocks or manacles are used in a Western BDSM context. The word shibari came into common use in the West at some point in the 1990s to describe the bondage art Kinbaku. Shibari (縛り?) is a Japanese word that literally means "Decoratively Tie".