The Origin of Shiatsu · Since 1925
Tokujiro Namikoshi
— The Founder of Shiatsu
1905 – 2000
Open daily, 11:00–19:00 (last booking)
Tokujiro Namikoshi created shiatsu
and gave it its name.
Tokujiro Namikoshi (1905–2000) created shiatsu and gave it its name. Everything called shiatsu today traces back to his hands.
From a boy's hands in Hokkaido.
He was still a boy when his mother fell ill with rheumatism in Rusutsu, Hokkaido — a place with no doctor and no medicine within reach. The children took turns pressing and stroking her to ease the pain, and she told them that Tokujiro's hands felt best of all. Following her words, he pressed slowly and firmly, one point at a time, until her body eased. From that came a conviction: the human body can be met with the hands alone. This was the beginning of shiatsu.
His mother told the children: Tokujiro's hands feel best of all.
1925 — the world's first shiatsu practice.
After earning his anma and massage licence, Tokujiro opened the world's first shiatsu practice in Muroran, Hokkaido, in 1925. In 1940 he founded a shiatsu school in Tokyo. His work carried shiatsu into Japanese law: recognised in 1955, and established in its own right in 1964 under the Anma, Massage and Shiatsu Practitioners Act.
Those who came to his hands.
Over his life Tokujiro attended fourteen Prime Ministers of Japan, among them Shigeru Yoshida. In 1954, while Marilyn Monroe was staying at the Imperial Hotel Tokyo during her honeymoon, an acute stomach cramp left her unwell; she declined the doctor's injection and medicine and asked for Tokujiro, who attended her over seven sessions through the rest of her stay. Muhammad Ali was among those who knew his hands as well. A hundred years of history rests on encounters like these.
"The heart of shiatsu is a mother's heart."
"Press, and the spring of life rises," he often said. He practised into his nineties and gave his whole life to shiatsu.
The line continues.
From Tokujiro the practice has passed in a single, direct family line — Tokujiro to Toru to Takashi to Tomoya, four generations. Today his great-grandson, the fourth-generation Tomoya Namikoshi, receives guests on the mezzanine floor of the Imperial Hotel Tokyo Main Building. This is shiatsu kept by the family that created it: the origin, not a copy.
The salon's practitioners hold the Japanese national Anma Massage Shiatsu Therapist licence.
The origin of Shiatsu,
carried by four generations
Namikoshi Shiatsu Salon — Imperial Hotel Tokyo, Main Building, Mezzanine Floor.
The founder's lineage, continuing today.
Open daily, 11:00–19:00 (last booking)