Nawa is the Japanese term for rope. Within Lifestyle usage the word appears as a component of many compound terms describing rope practice, its practitioners, and its cultural forms. It carries no inherent connotation of restraint or eroticism on its own; the surrounding term supplies that meaning.

The word predates any specialised rope practice by centuries and appears throughout Japanese material culture, agriculture, ritual and martial traditions.

Modern Western communities often encounter the word first through compound forms such as nawashi or nawajiri, and only later learn that nawa itself is a broad, everyday term.