As a growing boy on Hokkaido, a northern Japanese island, his family moved to when he was very young (1905).

Due to the climate’s extremes his mother developed arthritis in her knee which developed into rheumatoid arthritis of many of her joints.

The children took turns helping their mother as there was no doctor available. Tokujiro’s hands “felt best” to his mother, and he slowly discovered his treatments were more effective if he increased his ratio of pressing to rubbing techniques.

Eventually her body healed itself!

Later Tokujiro was to realize that by pressing on the muscles on either side of the middle region of her spine, he was stimulating the adrenal glands to produce cortisol, the cure for rheumatism!

But what this special child didn’t know was that he had unknowingly improved on an ancient massage therapy from china that was started in the 7th century!

This massage therapy was called Amna. In the 7^th century, when communication between Japan and China had opened up, Japanese students were sent to China to study their culture and medicine.

During this period martial arts and healing techniques like Jujitsu were gaining much popularity in Japan.

This resulted in the evolution of an effective massage technique known as Anma, which was normally performed by blind people and considered to be quite relaxing.

Based on the principles of Anma, a similar type of massage to the modern Shiatsu massage was first developed  in the early 20^th century, by Tamai Tempaku who published his book ‘Shiatsu Ho’ in the year 1919 and by 1955 Shiatsu was approved as a legal form of therapy under Anma massage.

But the new method developed by Tokujiro was considered the best technique and became the basis upon which the modern Shiatsu massage is based on.

At the suggestion of his brother, Namikoshi sought formal training in Amna and earned his license in 1925. Overtime, he gradually refined his original massage techniques and combined it with techniques from Amna to create modern-Shiatsu. Before long, Namikoshi opened a massage clinic in his home town of Hokkaido, Japan.

Unlike Amna, which utilized elbows, knees, and fists, Namikoshi’s massage style only utilized finger-pressure. As such, he named his style Shiatsu, which literally means finger-pressure, although the term had been used previously to describe different massage techniques.

Seeing the pain healing powers of Shiatsu, scientists started developing more innovative ways of using the Shaitsu massage therapy to cure people of arthritis, back pain, neck pain and other form of body pain But also the limitations of using just human fingers, hand and palms.

This led to the creation of the Pillow Massager.

The Pillow Massager is designed with nodes with bi-directional rolling for deep tissue message on your neck, shoulders, upper back, lower back, waist, foot, tights, calves, legs, feet and arms.

These nodes which are big and small are programmed to rotate in, or outward, giving you a completely relaxed massage experience.

It also has a heating therapy that provides a warm comforting sensation. It eases the muscle stiffness and increases blood flow thereby helps to get relief from pain more faster.