Shiatsu is pronounced shi-a-tsu, in three short syllables, and it is a Japanese word that English never translated. It is written with two characters: 指 (shi), a finger, and 圧 (atsu), pressure. Together they describe what the hands are doing.
Tokujiro Namikoshi gave the work that name in 1925, and the Namikoshi Shiatsu Salon still carries it on the Main Building Mezzanine of the Imperial Hotel Tokyo. Guests from overseas often ask us how to say the word, and what it means. So here is the story of how the word itself left Japan.
How to say it, and what it holds
In roman letters it is spelled shiatsu. Say it in three parts, shi-a-tsu, and you land close to the Japanese sound. Spellings such as shiatzu and siatsu turn up online, though shiatsu is the form the dictionaries carry.
The name describes the hand and nothing else, which is part of why it travels well. Why the work needed a name at all is the subject of the first article in this series, Where the Word “Shiatsu” Comes From.
English never settled on a translation
When shiatsu was first introduced abroad, English writers offered fingertip pressure as a rendering. As a description it is honest enough, and it is the phrase our own family history records as the starting point.
The translation never took hold. Fingertip pressure says nothing about where the points sit, in what order the hands move, or how the weight of a body travels down through a palm. Readers abroad reached for the sound instead of the explanation, and SHIATSU began to appear in English sentences untranslated.
Toru Namikoshi published a book called SHIATSU
The second generation opened that road. Toru Namikoshi, the eldest son of Tokujiro, published an English-language book titled SHIATSU and spent his working life explaining the practice to readers outside Japan.
Our family history puts it plainly: “the leading figure in the worldwide spread of shiatsu is Toru Namikoshi, and this was a fact that Tokujiro Namikoshi himself acknowledged.” The father named the work, and the son said it again in English.
You can follow that part of the story on our page for Toru Namikoshi, and see where he sits in the Namikoshi lineage.
The word entered an English dictionary untranslated
The Oxford English Dictionary carries an entry for shiatsu today. It sits there among the Japanese words that entered English whole, in the company of judo and sushi.
An entry means that enough English speakers use the sound without reaching for a translation. The word travelled further than its translation did, precisely because nobody replaced it.
指壓 and 지압 ― where the characters travelled instead
Where Chinese characters are used, the writing survived rather than the sound. Chinese keeps the pair as 指壓, written 指压 in the simplified form, and Korean reads the same two characters as 지압. Each language gives the characters its own pronunciation while the meaning, finger and pressure, stays visible on the page.
French, Italian and Spanish did the opposite and kept the sound. Le shiatsu and lo shiatsu take a local article and leave the noun exactly as it was. Some countries received the characters and others received the sound, and both lead back to two characters written in Japan in 1925.
The name arrives first, and the rest follows
A name travels faster than the thing it names. We meet guests every day who have known the word shiatsu for years without once lying down to receive it. Standing where the word began, we think of our work as handing over what is inside the sound.
You will find the Namikoshi Shiatsu Salon on the Main Building Mezzanine of the Imperial Hotel Tokyo, open 11:00 to 19:00 JST, every day of the year. The last session of the day begins at 19:00. Every practitioner here holds the Japanese national licence.
Sessions run 60 minutes at 16,500 yen, 90 minutes at 22,600 yen and 120 minutes at 28,600 yen, all taxes included. Reservations are taken by telephone on 03-3581-7354 and by email at reservation@
Shiatsu here is practised under the national licence of anma-massage-shiatsu practitioner. It is not a substitute for diagnosis or treatment by a physician.
Namikoshi Shiatsu Salon