Shiatsu is a hands-on culture born in Japan. Its source goes back to Tokujiro Namikoshi in 1925 — and its spirit and craft still live in the palms of the Namikoshi family today.
It Began with a Mother’s Hands
When a child scrapes a knee, a parent’s hand reaches for the hurt without thinking.
On a feverish night, many of us remember the warmth of a palm resting on the forehead.
Japan has a very old word for care: teate.
Written with the characters for “hand” and “to place,” it means, quite literally, to place one’s hand. The word itself holds an idea about the body that runs deep in this country. To touch. To stay near. To share the warmth of a hand.
Tokujiro Namikoshi, who created Shiatsu, put it in a single line:
“The heart of Shiatsu is the heart of a mother. Press the body, and the spring of life flows.”
To lay your hands on another’s body the way a mother cares for her child. Shiatsu took the culture of teate, long present in Japan, and gave it a single, coherent form.
Born in Hokkaido, 1925
Shiatsu was created in 1925.
The story begins with Tokujiro Namikoshi placing his hands on his mother’s aching knee.
No medicine, no instruments. Only his own fingers and palms.
Where to press, with what pressure, in what rhythm, so that the body would respond. Namikoshi worked it out with his own hands, building a theory of points and pressure as he went.
To the anma techniques and the wisdom of teate already present across Japan, he added one original idea: meeting the whole body through the fingers and palms. He gave this its name and its shape, and called it Shiatsu. The English Wikipedia entry, too, records Tokujiro Namikoshi as the founder of Shiatsu.
This is where Shiatsu began.
How “Shiatsu” Became a Word the World Knows
Shiatsu did not stay within Japan.
After the war, Namikoshi opened the Japan Shiatsu College, raising Shiatsu as a discipline and a profession. In time it crossed the sea and became a word understood around the world, kept in its Japanese form: Shiatsu.
As Sushi and Origami traveled abroad under their own names, Shiatsu became the name of a hands-on culture born in Japan.
Today, someone in Europe or America receives Shiatsu. At the distant source of each of those hands lies one pair of hands that touched a mother’s body in Hokkaido in 1925.
Four Generations, Unbroken
The Namikoshi family has carried Shiatsu forward as the work of the house.
Counting from the founder Tokujiro, the hands at work today belong to the third-generation Takashi Namikoshi and the fourth-generation Tomoya Namikoshi. The third generation is still active, still working with his hands, and the fourth carries on the craft and the spirit.
All three hold the national license of Anma Massage Shiatsu Practitioner.
The family that created the form still practices that form with their own hands. In the history of Shiatsu, this is something that belongs to the Namikoshi family alone.
Skill cannot pass through words alone.
Which point, at what angle, with how much weight. It is handed from palm to palm, from one generation to the next, over a long span of time.
What the Namikoshi family has kept for nearly a century is, in a sense, the memory held in those hands.
On the Mezzanine of the Imperial Hotel
The fourth generation, Tomoya Namikoshi, keeps his salon at the Imperial Hotel Tokyo, in Chiyoda, Tokyo. Namikoshi Shiatsu Salon sits on the mezzanine of the main building.
In this place, visited by people from Japan and abroad, he reads the condition of each body and meets it with palm and fingers. Sometimes a firm press, sometimes pressure laid on slowly. The hands adjust to the body of that day.
During a session, nothing remarkable happens.
A hand is simply touching.
It is a moment connected to the day Tokujiro Namikoshi laid his hands on his mother’s body.
Tightness slips away from the shoulders.
A stiffened body slowly loosens.
The strain of daily life eases, and the body returns toward its natural balance.
This is the shape that Shiatsu, a culture, takes as it passes through the palms.
A Culture of Touch, From Japan
In the way of tea, there is a form for preparing a single bowl.
In the martial ways, there is a bow that honors the other person.
Through Shiatsu, too, runs a Japanese way of the heart — a way of caring for another through the palms of the hands.
Press the body, and the spring of life flows.
The line Tokujiro left behind is not a description of technique. It is a word of respect for the act of touching itself.
Shiatsu: a hands-on culture born in Japan, carried out into the world.
Its source goes back to Tokujiro Namikoshi in 1925.
And its spirit and its craft still live in the palms of the Namikoshi hands.
Namikoshi Shiatsu Salon.
On the mezzanine of the main building, Imperial Hotel Tokyo. We look forward to welcoming you.