At the beginning of 20th Century, Tokujiro Namikoshi blended the wisdom of traditional Japanese massage with the bio-energetic principles of Chinese medicine and modern Western medicine's knowledge of Anatomy and Physiology. Presenting the results of his own research and discoveries, he created SHIATSU as an innovative discipline of hands-on massage therapy based on finger pressure. It is a term derived from the Japanese words 'shi' and 'atsu' meaning
finger and pressure
respectively. Since the fingers of the human hand have a greater number of sensory receptors than other regions of the body, they are extremely sensitive to contact. For this reason, the use of specialized machinery or conventional massage tools were excluded from SHIATSU's techniques, and even using other parts of the therapist's body is disapproved of; such as the fists or elbows, in order to concentrate on finger pressure as the therapy's primary tool.