A craftsman who reads
the body, in silence.

I had broken my lower back from sport. A stress fracture, the doctors said. The X-rays showed the bone had healed, and yet the pain remained. For months I returned to the hospital, and for months I left with the same compress and the same painkillers in my hand.

One day, my coach quietly suggested I try acupuncture. A single session — one slender needle, placed precisely — and the pain that had refused every treatment was simply gone.

I had not known the body could be read so accurately. From that day onward, I knew what I would become.

I sought out two of the most respected practitioners in Japan — men whose hands had cared for Olympic athletes. I came to them not asking to be hired, not asking to be taught. I asked only this: let me stay near you, do whatever needs doing, and let me watch.

Both told me they had never met anyone like that before.

The two were studies in opposition. One worked directly — reaching the root of the problem with his own hands, with conviction. The other worked indirectly — creating conditions so the body itself would find its way back to its proper place. Strength and softness. Two languages, both fluent in the same body.

For four years I went, every day after school. I never asked to be taught. I watched. I observed how each patient walked into the room, where their center of gravity rested, how they hid their pain. Beside each master, I quietly conducted my own consultation in my mind, formed my own diagnosis, and measured it against theirs.

Twenty thousand times, perhaps more. This is where my hands were made.

By then I was a third-year medical student. My hands had begun to know the body from the inside — through dissection, through anatomy, through the patient labour of memorising every muscle, every nerve, every articulation.

That year, I attended a seminar by a famous practitioner. I asked, quietly, why a certain technique worked the way it did. The answer was: "Just press it. Stop asking."

Something in me went still. If a method cannot be explained, it cannot be trusted. If it cannot be taught, it cannot be true. I decided, that afternoon, that I would build my own.

It was not a clinic. It was a place where the body could be read, slowly, by one pair of hands. Every movement justified by anatomy. Every result explainable in words.

In those years, I also served as the personal therapist for professional volleyball and football teams. Athletes whose bodies were their living. They taught me, too, how a body that is asked to perform speaks differently than one that is asked only to endure.

I called the practice YUKISIKI. There was no precedent, no teacher, no school. Only the body, and what it had to say.

I was invited to work in cities I had only read about. Different faces, different bones, different cultures of beauty and health. And yet, beneath the surface, the same quiet logic. A pelvis is a pelvis. A spine is a spine. The work was the same; only the language changed.

Eleven years after Okayama. The practice had grown, but the principle remained: a craftsman, two hands, one body at a time. I move between the two cities now — ten days here, ten days there. The work is not larger; it is only deeper.

The next chapter is Paris. Not as a tourist of the city I have admired since boyhood, but as a craftsman who intends to live there, work there, and offer something only a Japanese pair of hands could offer.

This journal is, in a quiet way, the road I am walking toward that door.