Midori (美登里) is a sexologist, educator, author, artist, speaker, and coach based in San Francisco, California. She wrote the first English-language instructional book on Japanese rope bondage and has continued to publish and teach on alternative sexual practices including BDSM, sexual fetishism, bondage, and erotic fiction. She teaches classes, presents at conferences, coaches individuals and professionals, and runs multi-day intensives. For English-speaking rope and kink communities, she is a foundational bridge between Japanese bondage craft and Western sex education.
Biography
Midori was born in Kyoto, Japan, to Japanese and German parents. She grew up in Tokyo and moved to the United States at age fourteen. She studied psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and served as a United States Army Reserve Intelligence officer while completing her degree. Early career work included a stint as a condom manufacturer’s sales representative and several years as a sex educator with San Francisco Sex Information. After military service she began an art career performing in queer nightclubs and collaborating with other transgressive and experimental artists—the same Bay Area ecology that fed her later kink teaching.
Teaching, Coaching, and Intensives
Midori teaches internationally on BDSM, alternative sexuality, feminine dominance, Shibari/Japanese bondage, and kink. She speaks at conferences, universities, and organizations that promote sexual health, wellness, and education. In 2021 she worked with the Sexual Health Alliance to create the year-long Kink Informed Certification (KIC) Program, training therapists, educators, coaches, and consultants who work with clients engaged in kink, BDSM, and alternative sexuality. That program marks a shift from purely community workshop culture toward formal professional literacy for clinicians.
She is especially known for weekend intensives such as ForteFemme: Women’s Dominance Intensive and Rope Dojo: Rope Bondage Weekend Intensive. Both use her “head-heart-hands” method: cognitive framing, emotional honesty, and practical skill in the same room. The focus is authentic intimate relationships, self-actualization, shame reduction, acceptance, and justice—rope and dominance as whole-person practice, not only as pretty ties for photos.
Art Practice
Midori is a multidisciplinary social-practice artist. She makes installations, performances, group exhibitions, and projects that examine human narrative, queer and Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) cultural experience, and the ephemeral nature of memory and place. She has lectured at universities and has been a resident artist at the San Francisco Battery. Exhibition and presentation venues include the San Francisco Asian Art Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Leslie Lohman Museum, SOMArts, Ithaca College, Das Arts Amsterdam, Gorilla Gallery Oaxaca, and Root Division, among others. She also offers creative coaching and consulting through Intersection for the Arts, a Bay Area nonprofit supporting artists’ growth. The art career and the kink-education career are not separate hobbies; both work the same themes of body, culture, and temporary spaces of intensity.
Awards
- Pantheon of Leather Awards Woman of the Year, 2003
- Sainted by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, 2007
- Best Sex Educator, SF Weekly, 2013
- Society of Janus Hall of Fame, 2019
- AASECT Humanitarian Award, 2022
Bibliography and Archives
Key books and contributions include:
- The Seductive Art of Japanese Rope Bondage, Greenery Press, 2002 — widely cited as the first English instructional book on Japanese rope bondage
- Wild Side Sex: The Book of Kink, Daedalus Publishing, 2005
- The Toybag Guide to Foot and Shoe Worship, Greenery Press, 2005
- Master Han’s Daughter: Tales from Depraved NeoTokyo, Circlet Press, 2006
- Silk Threads (co-author), Riverdale Avenue Books, 2019
- Contributing author, An Intersectional Approach to Sex Therapy: Centering the Lives of Indigenous, Racialized, and People of Color, Routledge, 2022
Her papers from 1990–2014 (FetishDiva Midori papers, MC 985) are held at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University—an archival sign that English-language rope pedagogy and public kink education are now research collections, not only club ephemera. For adult learners, Midori’s shelf is the practical through-line from early-2000s Greenery Press rope manuals to 2020s clinician certification and museum-adjacent art practice: kinbaku instruction, foot worship, erotic fiction, and intersectional sex therapy under one long teaching career.
