Where did the word “shiatsu” come from?
It is a word many of us use without a second thought, yet surprisingly few people know that it has a clear and specific beginning.
As this series opens, allow us to start there.
One person rests their hands on another’s body.
That act, in itself, is something people the world over have practiced since long ago.
But it was in 1925 that it took shape as a single, coherent system under the name “shiatsu.”
In that year, Tokujiro Namikoshi gave a name to the act of pressing with the fingers: shiatsu.
In English it is rendered as finger pressure, and today it is known around the world simply as Shiatsu.
Tokujiro is often described as the founder of modern shiatsu.
Why give it a name at all?
Because without a name, it cannot be passed on to another person, nor handed down to the next generation.
Pressing with the fingers.
Pressing with the palm.
And with the weight of the body behind it.
In each of these there is strength, there is order, there is a pause.
We gather all of it into a form that can be placed in another’s hands.
That, as we at Namikoshi Shiatsu Salon understand it, is why the word “shiatsu” was needed.
The moment the word was born, it became a craft, and it became a culture.
Here, there is one thing we would like to pause on.
What is the “pressure” that shiatsu speaks of?
It is the pressure that arises from a person’s hands and from the shifting of their body weight.
We believe it is different in kind from the steady force a machine produces.
This is not a question of which is greater and which is lesser.
It is a question of how each one comes to be.
The human hand senses how the body feels that day, and adjusts its strength, its angle, and its depth, little by little.
How the giving hand carries its weight.
How the receiving body breathes.
Within that exchange, the pressure is born anew, each time.
Namikoshi Shiatsu Salon sits on the mezzanine of the main building of the Imperial Hotel Tokyo.
It is a place where the word “shiatsu”—named in 1925—and the form of that pressure are still carried on by hand today.
The fourth generation after Tokujiro returns to the meaning of that same word in the work of each day.
To carry something on, the fourth generation often says, is not to frame it and hang it on a wall, but to keep moving those same hands, morning after morning.
We will close this first installment here.
Next time, we will look a little more closely at that single word, “pressure.”
From where it comes, to what takes place in the hands themselves.
We hope you will take your time, and stay with us.