Many people in Japan remember the phrase long before they remember the man. “The heart of shiatsu is a mother’s heart” travels from mouth to mouth, often with no name attached to it. The words belong to Tokujiro Namikoshi, who founded shiatsu, and we are the fourth generation of his family.
Guests ask us about that line more often than about anything else. So here it is from our side of the room, in the order it happened.
How the name is read
Tokujiro Namikoshi was born in 1905 in Tadotsu, in Kagawa Prefecture. His family moved to Hokkaido while he was still small, and he spent his boyhood in the village of Rusutsu.
His given name is written 徳治郎 and read to-ku-ji-ro. A second spelling, 徳次郎, still circulates in print, though the first one is correct. Both readings sound the same aloud, which is how the confusion began.
1925, and a single word
In 1925 he opened his practice in Hokkaido under the name shiatsu. He moved to Tokyo in 1933. In 1940 he founded the Japan Shiatsu Institute there and began training practitioners of his own.
Before that, hands-on work in Japan went by many different names. Setting down one word, and shaping the work so that it could be taught to others, is where the line we belong to begins. That is the reason we count our years from 1925.
“The heart of shiatsu is a mother’s heart”
The full saying runs like this: “The heart of shiatsu is a mother’s heart. Press the body, and the spring of life wells up.”
Shorter versions travel further, and we hear all of them at the salon. At the centre of the line sits a wish, that a practitioner’s palm might feel the way a mother’s hand once felt. Because the phrase is short, each person fills it with a memory of their own.
Guests who say it aloud on the table are usually thinking of someone particular. We rarely ask who.
In 1964 the word shiatsu entered the title of a Japanese law. That statute is the Act on Practitioners of Massage, Finger Pressure, Acupuncture and Moxacauterization, etc (Act No.217 of 1947). One man’s word had become part of how the country itself described the work.
Nothing about the hand changed on that day. We still begin by placing a palm on the back and reading the firmness of the body that morning. The order has stayed the same for a hundred years.
Jet Namikoshi, and the statue in Rusutsu
Television carried him into ordinary living rooms across Japan, and viewers began to call him Jet Namikoshi. In 1954 he gave shiatsu to Marilyn Monroe at the Imperial Hotel. Guests still tell us they remember his face from the screen.
The nickname moved faster than the work did. Its sound suggests speed, and some first-time guests arrive expecting something forceful. The hand is far quieter than that, and it changes depth slowly while it reads the body in front of it.
A bronze statue of Tokujiro Namikoshi stands in the village of Rusutsu, in Abuta District, Hokkaido. The place that held his boyhood still keeps his name. Guests sometimes come back from a trip north with photographs to show us.
Tokujiro Namikoshi died in 2000. Toru Namikoshi, the second generation, carried SHIATSU abroad, and Takashi Namikoshi received it as the third. With Tomoya Namikoshi as the fourth, we continue at the Namikoshi Shiatsu Salon on the Mezzanine floor of the Imperial Hotel Tokyo Main Building.
The salon is operated by Namikoshi Shiatsu Associates. Reservations are taken by telephone on +81-3-3581-7354, or by email at reservation@
Shiatsu is a practice based on the national licence of Anma Massage Shiatsu Practitioner. It is not a substitute for diagnosis or treatment by a physician.