Women in Shiatsu: Empowering us all

Alice Whieldon and in conversation with Gill Hall

​Growing out of the 2017 European Shiatsu Congress (ESF), a conversation started about women in Shiatsu.  Specifically, some people at the Vienna Congress expressed a view that the lack of women on podiums and running high profile workshops reflected an ongoing problem.  Gill Hall and I discussed this together and collaborated in a webinar and in developing these thoughts.

As we know, the overwhelming majority of practitioners are women and a disproportionate number of international teachers are men.  For some of us, the Shiatsu environment can feel like stepping back into a world we thought we had left behind in the 1980s.  This essay is a reflection on some of the issues discussed, privately and publicly.  It is not based on formal research and, I suggest, it would be good to put some research together to get a better idea of some of the facts. That so many international Shiatsu teachers are men may be puzzling given that so many teachers at a local level are women.  But I suggest there are some fairly straightforward reasons for this. 

Women still tend to be in caring roles in relation to children or other family members; they have commitments that make travelling abroad regularly, and for weekends, next to impossible.  It would be interesting to know how many female international teachers have children.  I do not have children but, despite this, my own sense of freedom is somewhat compromised by my dog!

My former partner and I decided to have a dog and he, my partner not the dog, travelled the world for work as a well-known speaker on human rights.  But the perceived pressure to care for our canine friend wasn’t a consideration for him when he agreed to speak in Australia, or the US.  I, on the other hand, started planning dog-care the moment I was invited down the road for an evening.  This is a very personal instance and won’t reflect all relationships, but many women nod in recognition when I mention it.  This is what women do and this has made it hard for us to establish ourselves on the international scene; we feel bad about those we believe we may be failing at home.

Also, there is a question of whether many women want to be on the international scene.  It is hardly glamourous, and women tend not to have the kind of support from partners or students that many men seem to attract automatically.  Exacerbating this is that women may not notice the support on offer and so fail to reach for it; we fear to claim it as our own. 

Moreover, women may be slower to assume the mantle of authority.  Classically we do not assume we have something to say that others will automatically want to hear.  We may be surprised when people show an interest.  Men seem, sometimes, to be happily freer of these particular anxieties.  Gill notes here to say that women don’t have to follow the same model of authority as men.  She is right: this model of authority is arguably patriarchal.  Not only do we need to find a way to take on our authority so that is not aggressively patriarchal, but being an authoritative woman, and likely an intelligent, articulate one, often attracts vilification from women at least as much as men. 

We discussed the way this links with the medical model and medical training which is often highly hierarchical and awards huge authority to doctors.  Are we aping that in Shiatsu by buying into this model of what we do?  Gill, a group facilitator, comments that training in business has developed in such that employees are encouraged to be more aware and empowered, where team work and  decision-making are encouraged; lectures are less and less the norm.  This is very unlike most Shiatsu training.

Shiatsu is a chronically low-paid business too.  In 2018 in the UK, all companies employing more than 200 people were legally obliged to publish data on pay.  It is already well established that the UK is a relatively poor performer in terms of gender equality in the workplace, but the figures still sent shock-waves through us as the reality of the discrimination became clear in hard numbers. 

We are not geared to think of Shiatsu in terms of salaried work but, if it were examined as such, I suggest it would be down there at subsistence pay in many cases.  Whether we like to admit it or not, women are programmed to undervalue their work and accept low pay, especially for work that can be classified as caring.  To think of charging proper money for Shiatsu sessions, let alone workshops, can send us into states of worry about our worth that highlights how deeply disempowered we can feel in the whole arena of the money and business.  It is a sense of disempowerment that is thoroughly internalised.

The world of work is still the world of men; we are there on sufferance.  It’s not on our terms; the hours do not suit the cycles of our bodies, our caring commitments.  Arguably it does not really suit anyone, but we haven’t finished the work of carving out a space for ourselves that serves us better.  Working from home on a part-time basis in Shiatsu may suit us nicely on the face of it, but few people earn well at it. 

Men, are under greater pressure to earn a proper living and show up in the public domain.  This mindset more easily lends itself to cultivating connections and promoting therapy work as a business.  There are of course women who make a living from therapies, but I suggest that there are a disproportionate number of men in the therapy industry making enough to live on comfortably.  This is due to a web of attitudes and assumptions so complex and so unconscious that it is hard to untangle the personal from the general.

The independent nature of Shiatsu practitioners also leaves us potentially isolated and often outside the institutions in which the majority pass their working week.  While many of us have gladly left those institutions behind or never engaged with them in the first place, it is nevertheless those institutions which, at their best, perform a consciousness-raising service that is invaluable.  Workplace diversity workshops, fair recruitment processes and protocols for dealing with harassment and bullying may be dull or heavy-handed at times, but they educate in ways that Shiatsu trainings are unlikely to address. 

The lone wolf practitioner may have avoided the numbing political correctness of office etiquette, but they may also be in danger of ending up in a backwater of outmoded and unexamined prejudice.  Women have, after all, been the majority participants in Shiatsu workshops led by male teachers; men may have put themselves forward, and why wouldn’t they, but it is women who have chosen to attend.

Should we perhaps be weaving consciousness raising into the fabric of Shiatsu training?  Along with the active support of talented women on the international stage? 

This is a difficult task when, we observe, many people don’t recognise the problem to start with.  I think we can only keep standing up and speaking and educating and it can be exhausting.  Women are still being written out of history, and often by women themselves who don’t appreciate what they are doing.  I experience this regularly with respect to the book I co-authored with Kishi.  Both in my hearing and in print, time and again, people talk to me about ‘Kishi’s book’.  Who exactly do they think wrote it?  What names are on the cover?  It is clearly incomprehensible to many people that I might actually have written it with him, in partnership.  I suggest this is partly because of the book itself and Kishi’s standing as a teacher but I think it unavoidable that it is also because I am a woman.  Whatever I may personally feel about this (anything from indifference to rage in fact) it is astonishing to me that this still happens.

Talking about all of this only gets us so far.  Action is essential.  To make Shiatsu an environment in which women are represented at all levels in the proportions in which they practise Shiatsu will need structural change.  Here are a few suggestions:

Not teaching at weekends – in the 1980s and 1990s, with big classes, it was possible in the larger schools to train during the week.  While it is true that many people need to work during the week to fund their training, other trainings and education happen during the week, so this might say something about Shiatsu self-identifying as a fringe activity.  A move towards working hours training as an option would not only demonstrate that we were taking Shiatsu seriously as a profession but would enable women to teach and study while children were at school or older relatives cared for.

We need to take a fresh look also at how we teach Shiatsu.  There still predominates in Shiatsu a presentation style which is more expert-lecturer than skilled teacher and she notes that here with respect to medical training.  This approach encourages an attitude of awe which often disempowers participants.  Given that teaching and learning must ideally be focused on empowering students to take ownership of the material, we need to examine and emphasise the importance of teaching skills in our profession.  Modern approaches effectively erase the teacher as a personality, lecturing from the front, and fosters an environment of dynamic learning driven by curiosity through support.  This would also model our Seiki approach rather than the medical model of ‘doing to’ the patient.

We could make a clear distinction between grassroots Shiatsu for friends and family and those who want to make a career of it.  Knowing the difference would enable us to make a choice.  Choosing Shiatsu as a career would help us focus on what it takes to earn a good living from this kind of work and work more closely together to achieve this.  As we worked together more, through professional associations and schools, we would have the critical mass to offer the kind of workplace consciousness raising that has hitherto been difficult.

For those who want Shiatsu to be their career it is vital that schools and associations actively support practitioners in charging proper money for their services which will, in turn, make it a more attractive profession to people from diverse backgrounds who may not have the luxury of working in Shiatsu as a second, or low, income.  It would serve, not only to raise income, but also morale and competence; if you are paid more it focuses your mind on doing a good job.  It is empowering.

Also, again for those who want to make a career in Shiatsu, national associations need to make sure that ratification is in alignment with recognised educational levels so that those without the funds to study may have access to education funding to study Shiatsu.  If we are intelligent about this, we do not need to compromise our work to do so but we do have to get better at explaining and defending our approach as different from the medical model.  We would all benefit from this.  If we work together as a bigger body we could be eligible to apply for funding for adult education and thus enable less well-off women to train; this would be a great gain for diversity. 

Some practitioners like to take Shiatsu to a sector of the public who cannot afford it as private health support. By not charging sufficiently in this way and in general, they are not creating some alternative to the health service. If we do not charge appropriately, we are not encouraging people to value and maintain their health. We are offering a cheap and easier option to going to a regular yoga, Tai Chi etc.  If we charge appropriately it may free up some time to do volunteer work or promote shiatsu for free and make it a more widely used option.

Finally, a few words about women and the body and women and words.  Barely at the level of consciousness we are inhabited with ideas about men and women; about gendered identities.  We may have come some way in changing these, but the symbolisms of gender are still hard-wired in our systems.  Woman or the feminine is object, associated with the body, the inchoate, feeling, emotional inarticulate body, Gaia, earth, defined by her relationships rather than her separate personhood.  Man is subject, aligned with the public, the spoken word, the assumption of an individual, speaking self. 

Shiatsu speaks to the emotion body, but the emotion body does not speak back much in ways we fully understand.  We can get lost in it too easily and end up at the mercy of feeling; disempowered in fact by an accidental over-emphasis on the felt.  We must speak the body, the emotions and, if we don’t know how yet, we must keep on trying until language emerges and we recognise it as our own. 

There is more to this issue than equal rights.  We need to press for equality of opportunity as a vital outward manifestation of stepping into our power.  We, women, need to keep speaking and finding our place in the outer, the public, world without losing our connection to feeling.  Maybe this is what makes Shiatsu and Seiki so exciting and crucial – this work sits on that edge between those worlds.   We can embrace our connection with body and feeling but please not at the expense of our ability to speak and act.  The personal is the political and it goes both ways.

Gill Hall is a Shiatsu teacher and Seiki practitioner in Spain.  She is a professional translator and group facilitator.

Alice Whieldon has degrees in Philosophy, Religious Studies and Theology and a PhD in Feminist Philosophy and Psychoanalytic Theory.  She presents Seiki workshops and Mind Clearing in the UK and internationally.

Shiatsu and The Myth of Meridians

This article was inspired by my work with Kishi on our book, Sei-ki: Life in Resonance, The Secret Art of Shiatsu 2011 Singing Dragon.  Kishi worked closely with Masunaga for 10 years before developing his own approach.  While writing the book he looked back with renewed interest at those years with his teacher, recalling the man and reading his work, some of which he had rescued from a rubbish bin where they languished after Masunaga’s resignation from The Japan Shiatsu College in 1968.  These are not his words or thoughts but are informed by our many conversations.

Meridians were not originally part of Shiatsu; they were introduced by Masunaga sensei for about 10 years as he experimented with different ways of explaining the work for the purpose of teaching.  They are not mentioned in Japan’s official Shiatsu training which follows Namikoshi’s original model.  By defining  Shiatsu in major part as ‘meridian work’, I wonder if we are limiting it unhelpfully and sticking with a format that was never intended to carry the practise as it does now?The term, shiatsu, started out at the beginning of the 20th century as a fairly loose umbrella for a variety of touch therapies and was only defined officially in Japan during the 1940s and ‘50s.  This move was prompted by the temporary American administration (1945-1952) threatening to regulate ‘traditional’[1] therapies in ways that did not serve the infant profession.  Those at the forefront of Shiatsu wanted to assert its difference from other methods and they, along with other professional bodies, were granted eight years to account for its unique efficacy in scientific terms to establish a case for a named license.  The academics and practitioners who came together on this project embraced the challenge as part of a more widespread movement to revive Japanese culture or ‘Ki Culture’.  On the team were both pioneering practitioner, Tokujiro Namikoshi, and clinical psychologist and practitioner, Shizuto Masunaga.

Under instructions laid down by the Ministry of Health and Welfare, they established a scientific methodology and ran exhaustive trials on the relative effects of Shiatsu.  Research was conducted on the evidence-based medical model that had represented the gold standard since the official adoption of German medicine by the Japanese Government in the mid-19th century.  The resulting description was expounded in the language of anatomy and physiology.  In response to this thorough account, Shiatsu was awarded a named license and the official report established the foundations of Shiatsu training in Japan, giving impetus to a Golden Age that continued through to the late 1970s.

While Acupuncture and Kanpo herbal medicine had never really lost their statuses and could be studied at degree level, manual therapy, the third and historically key element of Japanese medicine, had never been on a university curriculum, subsisting at the fringes of medicine along with any number of folk methods.  In establishing a coherent scientific account, the researchers had taken an important step towards its accommodation within the fold of university-taught Eastern medicine; a goal finally achieved, briefly, by Masunaga when he was appointed Professor at the Institute of Oriental Medical Research at Kitazano University in Tokyo.  Sadly, he died soon afterwards and the position was not filled again.

The license was a mixed blessing however; in the course of research it had become plain that the scientific model was philosophically incompatible with the model of health on which Eastern medicine was based.  It was not going to be as simple as translating Shiatsu into another, comparable language.  Western narratives of health and help depend on assumptions about humanity, sickness and health into which Eastern philosophy and medicine cannot be forced.  While some practitioners were content with having achieved a status that enabled them to work unhindered by the authorities, Masunaga saw the group’s achievement as merely the start of explaining Shiatsu in terms that were faithful to Eastern philosophy and satisfied the demands of text based teaching.

Given his background in psychology, it was natural that he should consider this discipline early on as a structure through which to explain Shiatsu; and it has some merit.  The traces of this attempt remained in his work and were picked up readily by later Western interpreters who found it familiar and accessible.  But Masunaga quickly came up against its limitations and moved on to Chinese medicine as a potentially better fit.

It is worth noting that when the Japanese talk about Chinese medicine they do not exactly mean the medicine of China and they certainly do not mean Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), a product of Maoist cultural revisionism.   Japan did borrow explicitly and extensively from its illustrious neighbour between the 7th and 17th centuries CE.  But what it took was re-moulded and re-formed to a Japanese sensibility.  The ‘Chinese’ medicine that held Masunaga’s interest for a decade was interpreted through a Japanese lens.  A Westerner going back to the Chinese texts will not see what he did.
Also, the classical Chinese medical texts were never intended to be either exhaustive or fixed.  They were written down as teaching aids in addition to the more important teaching that took place in close, personal, supervision.  While Masunaga did extensive research using the old charts and texts, his own meridian chart with its thick, vague, some would have it, inaccurate, lines, emphasises incompleteness and fluidity.  This is not the accident of a slap-dash artist and poor scholar.  The lines were not what mattered.  What mattered to Masunaga was meridian philosophy and not, as is so easy to assume in a more literalist culture, lines mapping some concrete reality.  Meridians, in fact, have no existence outside the skilled touch of the practitioner.  More than this, no map can ever represent the present moment of flux so will always only be a rough suggestion and snapshot of something past.

In his postgraduate institute, the Iokai, Masunaga did not teach meridians.  He taught feeling or sesshin, first and foremost.   His theory, and the connection he made between it and concrete manual practice was difficult.  Few of his disciples understood it, requiring as it did, a depth understanding of classical Eastern philosophy as well as great skill and experience in manual performance.  Masunaga, excelling in both, was a rare exception.

Although in his own time Masunaga was a figure of considerable standing within the wider world of traditional medicine, his path was by no means smooth.  He outraged his contemporaries by proposing Western psychology as a model for Eastern medicine, left his teaching post at Namikoshi’s Japan Shiatsu College indignant at the opposition some of his colleagues expressed to his unorthodox teaching and, in turning to Acupuncture theory for inspiration, found himself set against the Japanese Acupuncture Association in his interpretation of core principles.  Few really understood his work and his extensive publications have left barely a mark, though his influence and myth live on.  This is perhaps fuelled more by Youtube now, than anything he ever wrote or taught to his close disciples.

There is evidence in his later writing that Masunaga reached the limitations of meridian and Acupuncture theory for use in Shiatsu.  An indefatigable researcher, his ideas were moving closer to a Buddhist account that called for a language outside medicine and honoured the present moment.  Sadly this work was never completed and we cannot know for certain where he was heading.

One could ask what we can draw from this history.  One thing is certain: Western, Masunaga-style, Shiatsu has considerable investment in maintaining the meridian model as a teaching tool and has identified itself so closely with this system that is would now be quite radical to change it.  Even knowing this history, it would take courage and energy to rework Shiatsu, though it is clear that there are practitioners who understand its limitations and do interesting work in supplementing and developing it.

Knowing a little more about the history of Shiatsu in Japan can be useful to Western practitioners.  For instance, it is clear that claims that Shiatsu is either unscientific or needs to be made to fit with science miss the point for they use the wrong model.  Some understanding of the Eastern approach to health and well-being can give us a strong, alternative account into which Western medicine fits as a subset, rather than the other way around.  Conversely, the scientific research conducted by the Japanese licensing project is currently mostly lost to the West but could, in principle, provide the foundation for judicious use of scientific language in instances where this might be useful; thus employing the Buddhist principle of skilful means which advocates using any (ethical) means to get an important message across.

An intelligently led professional body could steer a creative path through the potential pitfalls and use the language of science strategically while fostering a more subtle, over-arching and informed profession that acknowledges the history of Shiatsu in its entirety.

Masunaga’s interest was not confined to Shiatsu but extended to a life philosophy that was utopian in seeking to re-locate an Eastern or Buddhist account of humanity at the heart of all aspects of life.  Many practitioners have found for themselves that meridians and TCM are fickle guides in real life and have sought other languages for their work, often pillaging from Reiki, Chi Gong and a host of New Age therapies and spiritualties or simply following their feeling and quietly dropping the formalities of school Shiatsu.  The proliferation of styles, all trying to fill gaps in theory and make a whole out of the scraps that have found their way to the West, speak volumes about the lack of a clear philosophical foundation.  It also speaks of a fantastic spirit of enquiry, enthusiasm and need for a more satisfying approach to health through human touch.

There is an argument for having the courage to resist definitions based on theory and technique in favour of repositioning Shiatsu as, first and foremost, a discipline that places personal development and authority over form and technique.  The imperative is to look with innocent eyes and touch with empty minds for the fleeting now.  Perhaps name what you find ‘meridians’ if it seems appropriate…or maybe be braver than that.

Alice Whieldon began her Shiatsu training in 1991 and met Kishi sensei in 1998.  She worked with him from that point, culminating in writing a book with him.  She practices Seiki and psychotherapy in London, leads Seiki workshops and is also a senior manager and tutor for the Open University in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities.  See: www.alicewhieldon.com for details of treatments.  If you find this article interesting and want to know more, it is recommended that you read: Seiki, Life in Resonance: The Secret Art of Shiatsu by Akinobu Kishi and Alice Whieldon

[1] ‘Traditional’ medicine is something of a problematic notion.  It is difficult, if not impossible, to establish what it actually refers to and more usually refers to a revival based on often political ideology.  This was clearly the case with the ‘traditional’ Japanese arts in the mid-20th century as the Japanese strove to re-establish national identity.