Tetsuro Saito
The Father of Shiatsu in Canada
Tetsuro (Ted) Saito is one of the world’s few shiatsu masters. He has spent a lifetime fully dedicated to developing shiatsu and its healing potential. Born in the small Japanese city of Noda in 1941, he was initially trained as an electrical engineer. But, drawn to the even greater complexity of systems within the human body, in 1966 he began his training in the art and practice of Shiatsu at the Japan Shiatsu School, under masters Tokujiro Namikoshi and Shizuto Masunaga. He later became a member of the Masunaga Research Group.
In 1971, just as the West was discovering acupuncture, Saito moved to Canada, opened the Shiatsu Centre in downtown Toronto and introduced the Japanese art of "finger pressure." For the past four decades, he has treated thousands of patients, trained hundreds of therapists worldwide, and pursued his own research on energy-based healing.
He is affectionately known as the “father of shiatsu” in Canada, but his influence on shiatsu and energy work has rippled worldwide. Saito is founding director of Shin So Shiatsu International and supports hundreds of dedicated post-graduate students in North America and Europe. He continues to research and maintains a shiatsu practice at the Shiatsu Centre in Toronto.
In 2006, he published a two-volume compendium of his new paradigm: Shin So Shiatsu – Healing the Deeper Meridian Systems and Shin So Shiatsu – Practitioner's Reference Manual.
“Dealing with the energetic world requires a flexible mind. But my ability to feel ki and meridians developed through shiatsu and not through my engineering training. A scientific mind can often interfere with the sensibility of ki! However, the structuring of my research, my scientific attitude to research and the way I explain my findings to my students does reflect my engineering background. The problem with modern medicine is this – when practitioners cannot see energy, they don’t believe in it.”
– Testuro Saito, in Sand to Sky: Conversations with Teachers of Asian Medicine, by Pamela Ellen Ferguson and Debra Duncan Persinger, Phd, iUniverse, Inc, 2008.