Introduction
I am rebuilding the Rolfing website. The work is being done, as before, by Tomoki Kirigishi, the digital designer who has looked after the site for years. It should go live before long.
What is taking the time, though, is what comes before that. I am reading through the articles inside it, one at a time.
I had meant to write about it once the new site was finished, but the middle of the work seems worth setting down, so I will do it in several parts. This is the first, and it begins with a simpler question: how did the articles come to number what they do?
In Fifteen Years, 540 Articles in Japanese
It began before the Rolfing site existed, and before I had met Rolfing at all.
In May 2010 I started writing on a Japanese blogging service called Ameba, while I was still working for a pharmaceutical company. I was practising Ashtanga yoga and had begun meeting people through calligraphy and the tea ceremony, and I wanted somewhere to write that was not a closed social network.
That July I had personal business cards made. The company cards carried none of what I actually wanted to hand people — no private address, no mobile number, nothing about what I did outside work. For the design I asked Norihito Ishikawa, a calligrapher, to make me a kaō.
A kaō is a stylised monogram, drawn in a single gesture, used in Japan in place of a signature or a seal. It came into use among the aristocracy and the warrior class, and it survives today in the world of tea and calligraphy, where people sign their work with one. It is a mark rather than a name: it does not spell anything out.
I put the kaō at the centre of the card, and arranged around it the things I was actually doing — coaching, work, yoga, books, travel, diving — laid out like a mind map. I had two hundred printed, thinking they would last a good while. They were gone in six months.
In August 2011 I moved the writing to WordPress. The advertising on the blogging service had begun to bother me. I registered a domain, took space on a rented server, and asked Shin’ichirō Fujii of JESTO to build it. The site took the same shape as the card: the kaō at the centre, with blog, books, links and photographs arranged around it. I called it the kaō site.
Everything went there. The years at the pharmaceutical company, the year I spent travelling around the world, and then the Rolfing training in Munich.
I finished the training in March 2015 and opened a practice in Shibuya that June. At first there was no site for it. As I began looking for clients, it became clear I needed one.
In September 2015 I settled on a name to trade under and had a logo made.
The logo carries what Rolfing is about, as I understood it then. Two curves, for the way the upper body and the lower body are continuous — the two sides of the spine, the two legs. A figure arranged along gravity, using the least force to produce the most. Around it a circle, for emptiness in the Zen sense, and for the fascia that surrounds and supports the organs. The circle also reads as a reset button, and the shape of a zero. The letters of ZERO are drawn as lines, like the raked gravel of a karesansui garden. Two colours: purple, for judgement that rests on feeling and intuition, and yellow, for what gives people hope and draws them out.
The Rolfing site went up in December 2015, six months after I opened and once the name was settled. Mr Fujii built it again, this time with Yoshitaka Komuro, who runs Knowledge Commons. But it was only a front door. The blog stayed on the kaō site.
The two were brought together in July 2017. Of what had been written on the kaō site, the pieces to do with Rolfing were moved across here; the rest stayed where they were, on what later became the other site. That is why there are more than fourteen hundred articles over there, and why the older entries here run back to years before I had met the work.
The English version came in July 2019.
Fifteen years on from that first WordPress site, I counted. There were 540 articles in Japanese on Rolfing and what surrounds it. Of those, about 170 had an English version. Not quite a third.
Writing them one at a time, I had no sense of the number.
Why So Many
One reason is simple. There was no textbook.
From August 2014 to March 2015 I took the basic Rolfing training in Munich. Eighty-four days, seven hundred and thirty-one hours. In all that time, nothing was handed out that could be called a text.
That was not an oversight. Ida Rolf, who founded the work, taught that way on purpose. One of her students has described her taking away an anatomy textbook he had brought with him. The eye is grown by being fed information until it saturates, not by being handed a summary.
So every day I wrote down what I had seen and what had been said. Less to publish than to build the textbook I had not been given. It passed a hundred pieces during the training, and it went on after I came home.
What I had not expected was that other people were reading it. People taking the training in Europe found it, and some of them, now Rolfers themselves, have told me since that they had.
There is a second reason I kept going.
Rolfing cannot be said in a sentence.
Call it hands-on work with fascia, and that is true as far as it goes, but it is not all of it. Say it organises posture, and nobody can tell how it differs from the massage or manual therapy they already know. Say it works with the body’s relation to gravity, and most people have no idea what that means. Say it comes as a series of ten sessions, and you have said nothing about what happens in them.
None of those is wrong, and none of them is enough. So I would write another one from a different angle. From breathing. From walking. From what a client said afterwards. From what I was taught in the training. From where it sits alongside other kinds of bodywork.
That is what I have been doing: trying to fence in something that cannot be said once, by saying it many ways. The 540 are what came of it.
Four Rebuilds in Japanese, Two in English
Since bringing the two sites together in 2017, I have rebuilt it several times.
June 2018. A television appearance, and what Google Analytics showed, prompted me to go over the top page. I cut the number of things displayed and made the writing as plain as I could.
February 2021. Having built a second site, Mind and Bodywork Lab, I pared the Rolfing site back. New photograph on the top page, new logo, and the colour changed from purple to green.
June 2024. To improve loading speed, the site was rebuilt on a new WordPress theme, Snow Monkey. The following month the domain changed from zero.hidefumiotsuka.com to rolfing-zero.hidefumiotsuka.com. I wrote about that in “Rebuilding the Website for Speed — And Changing the Domain Name.”
February 2025. I revised the English site, which had been untouched since 2019. Two things made it possible: ChatGPT arriving in November 2022, which raised the quality of Japanese-to-English translation considerably, and WordPress becoming able to switch between the two languages within one site. I started in October 2024, ran into trouble with English typography and with links that would not hold, and finished four months later.
This rebuild is the fifth on the Japanese side.
This Time, the Contents Rather Than the Frame
All four of those were repairs to the frame. The layout of the top page, where the logo sat, the colour, the loading speed, the domain name. Every one of them concerns how the site looks.
How many articles were inside it, and what each of them said, I had never counted.
This time that is where I started. I am reading them in order of posting, one at a time, and sorting them into three.
Ones to keep. Ones not to keep. And ones to be edited together into a single piece.
So far, 540 has become 443, as of 14 September 2026.
The other site, Mind and Bodywork Lab, holds 1,450 articles. I have not touched it. At some point the same thing will have to happen there.
Conclusion
This piece has been about how much had accumulated in fifteen years, and why.
Next time I want to write about the cutting itself. It has turned out to be harder than I expected.