Kensen’s Story from Tokyo to Toronto
Today I feel that my life is only partly my own. The rest belongs to shiatsu, to all the people I help through shiatsu and to the people I teach to practise it. When I was young, such a statement about my life would have been totally unimaginable to me. The greatest future I could have dreamed up was to be an Olympic medal-winning athlete. Sometimes when I look back and see how I got from that point to this, I am quite astonished.
My parents met a few years before the Second World War, at the Tokyo English Speaking Society. My father was a college student studying English at Tokyo Shodai, and my mother, who had been raised and educated in Canada, had just graduated from the University of British Columbia and moved back to Japan. They married, and when my father returned from serving in the war, they settled in Ichikawa City near Tokyo, and he started a business. Then I was born on January 27, 1951. I was the second child; I have an older sister. When I was five years old, we moved to Tokyo. The period right after that was not a good one: my father`s business went under, he lost his inheritance through gambling, and within a couple of years my parents were divorced. My sister and I were raised by our mother. Mother was always a very hard-working woman and had a positive outlook. From the time I was very young, she let me know that she wanted me to have a good education but that there was more to life than school. “High marks are no guarantee of success in life,” she would say. From her, I also learned tolerance and endurance.
Judo is very popular in Japan, and as a boy I took judo classes. However, when I was 14, the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo changed my interests. The number one Japanese heavyweight judo competitor was defeated by a Dutchman. As well, the Ethiopian Abebe Bikila, a gold medalist at the Rome Olympics, won the marathon for the second time, and a Japanese runner came third (Japan`s first track and field medal of the Games). My future course seemed obvious to me: the next day I switched from judo to distance running. Throughout high school, I was so involved with running that my grades got lower with every test. I had entered high school with the second highest marks among all 450 athletes. By the third year, I was almost at the bottom of the class. I wanted to get into a good university, but with the marks I was getting, the whole idea seemed pretty farfetched. When I had a one-on-one staff-student interview in my third year of high school, the teacher conducting the interview asked me what plans I had for my future. I named a couple of good universities; he laughed and advised me that my academic plans would be virtually impossible with the marks I was getting.
I cared very much about becoming an Olympic athlete. I trained hard. One day during gym class, I jumped into the swimming pool and hit my back hard against the water. After that, I suffered terrible back pain. The painkillers my family doctor gave me were no help. The chiropractor I went to was not able to do much. I was in a lot of pain, and it frustrated me that the pain, stiffness, headaches and fatigue were affecting my training.
Finally a family friend sent me to her practitioner, an old man with a black belt in judo; he was a bone setter. The old man gave me hands-on treatments for 10 or 15 minutes at a time. I was very sore and found the first sessions somewhat painful. But even after the very first treatment, I noticed a difference just walking back to the train station. It felt as if a rope that had been binding me was cut off. My instinct told me that this was different from any treatment I’d had before and was going to help me a great deal. Many of my first-time clients experience the same type of feeling.
I went to the old man for treatments almost every day for a month and a half, and by the end of that time, my symptoms were gone. He asked me what I wanted to do with my life. I told him I was thinking of becoming a journalist and going abroad but first I had to go to a good university, which would be a problem because my marks were so poor. “That’s because of the stiffness in your neck,” he replied to my surprise. “It keeps you from having the power of concentration.” The hands-on treatments he gave me not only removed the problems I had been having with my back and fatigue but they also released the stiffness in my neck. I did find it easier to concentrate, and my marks began to improve. The old man suggested that I become a physical practitioner like him, but I was not interested at that time. I had other dreams.
That fall after completing the treatments, I ran in competitions and achieved my best results ever. It was very satisfying. That was a difficult year in Japan, with a lot of conflict between students and police, student demonstrations and pervasive disruption arising out of the student power movement and the resistance to it from authorities. Tear gas was used widely during the demonstrations; sometimes I could not walk up our street without tears in my eyes because of it. The University of Tokyo’s entrance exam was cancelled because students had taken over the buildings in protest. Along with many high school graduates that year, I decided to bypass the disruptions, take a year off from my formal studies and prepare for the university entrance exams the following year. A year later, I entered Keio University, the oldest private university in Japan and one of the best in the country.
I could see that I was never going to make it as a distance runner and decided to try out for boxing at the university. One look at the toothless grin of the boxing team’s sophomore made me change my mind in a hurry. I signed up for the wrestling team instead. That year, I went periodically for treatments from the old judo man who had helped me recover from my back pain and neck problems. I always went to him before my exams and before my wrestling matches and, with his help, achieved good results. At that time, shiatsu was becoming very popular in Japan, and Tokijiro Namikoshi had a regular television series. I asked the old judo man what he thought of shiatsu. He told me he thought it was very good, so I decided I wanted to learn it. He taught me some of his techniques, and I took an evening course for beginners at the Japan Shiatsu School. I practised on my wrestling teammates and on some family friends who wanted to give it a try.
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