Working as a Rolfer (Part 3)
Since opening in Shibuya in June 2015, I have moved the session room four times: three addresses in Sakuragaoka, in Shibuya, and one in Ebisu. For a while I also kept a separate place in Tsunashima, an hour south of the city, for events.
One reason the practice survived those moves is that I rented the room out from the beginning. In Tokyo, rent is usually the largest fixed cost a practitioner carries, and a room that sits empty between sessions is the easiest money to lose. This is what I looked for in each place, and what sharing it did for the business.
The first room (2015–2017)
On 1 June 2015 I found a room a five-minute walk from Shibuya station, forty square metres, and signed within a week. There was space for six yoga mats. The advice I had been given before opening — have a room of your own — took this shape.
The lease was for a year, but the building’s renovation kept being postponed, and it was extended twice, finally to 30 June 2017. That gave me two settled years. As I wrote at the end of the first year, holding one place for a stretch of time matters more to a practice than it sounds.
In 2016 I added a second room in the same building, so that two people could be seen more easily.
Sharing the room was part of the plan
From the day I signed the first lease, I intended to rent the room out whenever I was not using it. I priced it below comparable rooms near Shibuya.
There were two reasons beyond the rent. My leaflets were in the room, so the clients of whoever rented it saw what I did. And the practitioners who rented it became colleagues who wanted my work to go well.
I barely advertised it. Yoga and Pilates teachers, acupuncturists and other Rolfers found it through people they knew. By 2021 I was renting twenty to thirty slots a month, and eight practitioners had used the room over the years.
In total I shared the room with other practitioners for seven and a half years. Their bookings are what paid the rent in the months when my own were thin. As I wrote at the six-year mark: renting out a room I had taken with renting in mind is what held the business up when it was hard.
The second room (2017–2019)
With the first lease ending, I started looking in early 2017. The question I set myself was who I wanted to see gathering there. A place colleagues could drop into easily. A place where an event with food was possible. A place I could still rent out. And within five minutes of Shibuya station.
On 4 April 2017, prompted by a message from a friend, I went to an agent near the west exit of Shibuya station. A new building I had already noticed was among the listings. What I ended up with was a room on the tenth floor — the same number as the sessions in the series — closer to the station than before.
The bedroom and living room were separate, so two sessions could run at once and the renting could continue. I equipped the kitchen and made it a place people could gather. I began working there on 18 April and cleared the first room on 29 May. Two rooms became one, and the practice became more compact.
This is where the cooking events ran, and where the book club started in December 2017. As many as thirty people came at times. For gatherings that size, the room was too small.
Ebisu (2019–2022)
On 26 March 2019 I moved to Ebisu, one station from Shibuya. Twelfth floor, with a lift, so clients who cannot manage stairs could come. A Japanese-style room and a living room that open into each other, about twenty tatami mats together with the sliding doors pushed back. With a projector and screen, it held seminars and the book club.
Two rooms could be used for hands-on work, and both were available to rent. Through the pandemic, when my own sessions dropped, those bookings kept coming.
Ebisu lasted close to three years and ten months. I closed it on 29 December 2022.
Sessions in Shibuya, events in Tsunashima (2023–)
Facing a second renewal in Ebisu, I split the two functions. Sessions in Shibuya, events in Tsunashima. I moved on 5 January 2023 and opened in Shibuya the next day. The Shibuya room is in the same building where I started in 2015.
In Tsunashima, between January 2023 and November 2025, the book club met 35 times. It was a fifteen-minute walk from the station, and as I wrote afterwards, people came in numbers despite it being a place that is not convenient to reach.
In January 2026 I left Tsunashima and returned to Shibuya. From July 2026 the Shibuya room is available to rent again, and two practitioners are using it.
What I look for in a room
Three things, every time: that sessions work there, that people can gather, and that it can be shared. Because renting it out was in the plan from the first lease, the rent kept being paid through the months when sessions thinned. Moving four times in eleven years did not break the practice, and the shared room is a large part of why.
In this series
The twelve-year record is collected in Working as a Rolfer — A Record of Finding Clients and Running a Practice.
- Part 1 They Came Without Any Advertising
- Part 2 The Six Months When Clients Stopped Coming
- Part 3 Four Moves, and a Room I Always Meant to Share (this article)
- Part 4 Funding and Rebuilding Through the Pandemic
- Part 5 I Moved the Articles, and Search Lost Me
Each year of this record was written as it happened, in Japanese, on my other site.