The Life of Nakamura Tempu (1)

AWAKING FROM THE WANDERING DREAM—
THE LIFE OF NAKAMURA TEMPU
(Part One)

By H. E. Davey
Photos courtesy of Sawai Atsuhiro


Now I am completely awakened from the wandering dream, and I stand at the entrance to a new, enlightened existence. My eyes are open to see a brilliant life in the future. My heart is filled with inexpressible and infinite joy.

Nakamura Tempu (1)

Since the early 1920s, a unique spiritual path has existed in Japan. This distinctly Japanese version of yoga is called Shin-shin-toitsu-do, and it combines seated meditation, moving meditation, breathing exercises, and other disciplines to help practitioners realize unification of mind and body. A synthetic method, it’s also influenced by Japanese meditative and healing arts, martial arts, as well as Western psychology, medicine, and science. Shin-shin-toitsu-do is widely practiced throughout Japan. And it is almost unknown in other countries.

Through its principles of mind and body coordination people have an opportunity to realize their full potential in everyday life. A remarkable man, who led an equally remarkable life, created it. He was known in Japan as Nakamura Tempu Sensei, and this is his story.

The Birth of Nakamura Saburo
Nakamura Sensei’s father Sukeoki was a samurai (a bushi warrior) and a son of a prominent feudal lord in Kyushu. Descended from the Tachibana family of the Yanagawa Clan, Sukeoki was a progressive man, who introduced European ideas into his country. Chou, Nakamura Sensei’s mother, a charming woman, strong and reliable, was born in Tokyo.

For much of Japanese history, the Emperor reigned, but he didn’t actually rule. A feudal military regime, lead by the bushi caste, governed Japan with an iron fist.

In the late 1800s, Emperor Meiji and his followers wrenched Japan from the hold of the bushi in a bloody civil war. After the Meiji Restoration in 1868, the bushi were no longer in power, and their class, with its special rights and privileges, was abolished. Nakamura Sensei’s ex-bushi father was given a high-ranking post in Tokyo with the Department of the Mint in the Finance Ministry. While working for the Mint, he invented an exceptionally strong paper (made of silk and traditional Japanese paper), which was used to manufacture the new government’s bank notes. The family lived well in a Tokyo suburb, not far from the paper factory. Nakamura Sensei was born in this house in 1876 and originally named Nakamura Saburo.

A British engineer, who specialized in printing, was employed by the Mint. He lived near the Nakamura family, and his family was fond of Saburo. They taught him conversational English on a daily basis. He excelled in English, a skill that served him well during his later travels in the USA, Europe, and India.

He was a wild child, and hoping that some discipline would settle little Saburo down, his parents enrolled him in martial arts classes at age six. It didn’t work. Once during a schoolyard fight, he became so furious that he broke a child’s fingers and tore off another’s earlobe! This is quite a contrast with the gentleperson he became, a respected spiritual teacher who espoused world peace.

In junior high school, Saburo led the school judo club. When his squad defeated another school’s team in a tournament, the losers bore a grudge against him since he was the winning club’s headman. They ambushed him when he was coming home from school; ten of the boys beat him severely.

The next morning, Saburo visited each of their homes and confronted them. Apologies were forcefully extracted. Finally, he visited the house of the losing team’s leader, and upon entering the residence, found the teenager. Fearing for his life, the boy rushed into his kitchen, grabbed a knife, and attacked Saburo. They grappled until Saburo snatched away the knife and plunged it into his adversary’s belly.

The boy died. Saburo went to prison. He was subsequently released after being declared innocent, having acted in self-defense. He obviously hated being bullied and losing to others.

While problematic in childhood, he later felt that, as he matured, aspects of this attitude helped him overcome several difficulties which arose in his life. In time, this inclination mutated into a search for perfection that caused him to take immense satisfaction in doing anything and everything thoroughly. Still later as a teacher, his perfectionism could be seen in his quest for genuine truth through science and philosophy.

A Secret Agent is Born and Nearly Dies
Nakamura Saburo played an active role as a military intelligence agent in the Sino-Japanese War (1894-95). He engaged in secret service activities in Manchuria and China a few months before the Sino-Japanese War. He studied Chinese intensely for one year in preparation for entering Mongolia and China.

When the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05) broke out, he applied for a job as an undercover agent and got it—even though there were 2000 applicants. Saburo was chosen because his history indicated that he was courageous, and because he excelled at judo, kendo (a modern sport based on swordsmanship), and Zuihen Ryu batto-jutsu, an ancient form of swordsmanship. (His ties to Toyama Mitsuru, a political leader, also likely helped during the selection process.)

He worked as a spy in Manchuria with his partner Hashizume, a Japanese person born in Manchuria, but who looked Chinese. During the Russo-Japanese War their team blew up bridges and railways, slipped into the headquarters of the enemy to steal documents, and fought with bandits using swords. Saburo, in particular, was a lethal weapon when he had a sword in his hands. Despite his skill, he was captured by a Cossack cavalry and sentenced to die.

He later wrote that, to his surprise, he wasn’t afraid to face death. In fact, he had a sound night’s sleep before his scheduled execution. That morning he was served a substantial Russian breakfast, which he ate to his heart’s content.

The official, who was to observe the execution, joined him at breakfast. Impressed by Saburo’s composure, he said, “You look like a young boy. I’m sorry I have to execute you. Do you have anything to say before you die?”

“No, nothing.”

“Strange . . . you don’t look sad or frightened. Why?”

Saburo said, “I’m not sad, but I do regret something.”

“What do you regret?”

“My mother can’t see me now.”

The Russian official exclaimed, “I don’t understand Japanese people! Would your mother be happy to see you die?”

“No, but she’d be proud that I’m dying for my country.”

Before he was to be executed, Saburo refused a blindfold. Tied to a wooden post, he told the three gunmen, “I want to see where your bullets hit me. Don’t miss.”

When the shooters were about to fire, a hand grenade exploded. It marked the timely arrival of Hashizume. He was told of Saburo’s plight by a Chinese girl Saburo once saved from bandits. The commotion caused by the explosion allowed him to run away, albeit with a stake stuck to his back. It was a narrow escape. Later, this incident became a play performed in Japanese theaters.

Tuberculosis and the Search for a New Life
Japan won the Russo-Japanese War. However, Saburo’s life in Manchuria was less than wonderful. He drank polluted water, ate rotten food, and worked in disguise, wearing old laborer’s clothes. At 29 years old, he returned to his parents’ house in Tokyo. (He was one of only nine people that returned home alive out of his group of 113 military personnel.) After his return, Chairman Nezu Kaichiro asked him to join the Dai Nippon Flour Mill as an executive.

His employment was cut short when he began coughing frequently, and after vomiting blood, he was diagnosed with severe tuberculosis, which he probably contracted during the war. Death was advancing, and there was no cure in those days. In fact, the doctor who made this diagnosis gave him only six months to live.

Despite Saburo’s knowledge of Japanese healing methods, his condition worsened. This created not only a problem in his body but also in his mind. Along with tuberculosis came an existential crisis that was worse. Years later, he wrote that when he’d been sentenced to die, he wasn’t afraid, but this time it was different. Feeling his physical and emotional deterioration, he grew angry with himself. He began reading about religion and philosophy, constantly pondering the meaning of life. He met religious authorities, Christian and Zen Buddhist, but none of them could help him find peace of mind.

Looking for clear, pragmatic principles or methods that could guide him, he didn’t find them in organized religion. What he did find, he subsequently recalled, were people preaching certain ideas, who couldn’t actually teach them. When Saburo became the celebrated meditation teacher Tempu, his first priority was inventing easily understood principles and techniques of mind-body unification. He helped people with immense compassion, remembering what he went through during his illness.

Even with our modern ease of transportation, most of us wouldn’t travel internationally while seriously ill, but this wasn’t the case with Saburo. He visited the United States in 1909 to meet Orison Swett Marden, a doctor and author of books on personal growth. While in the U.S., Saburo received Western medical care, which initially seemed to cure him. Pleased with the potency of these treatments, Nakamura Sensei attended Columbia University, where he studied medicine.

But his illness returned, and he was crushed. After the long journey by ship, crossing the Pacific Ocean to seek answers about human mortality and to treat his disease, he was coughing up blood again.

Despite training in Japanese spiritual paths, since his tuberculosis diagnosis he’d become completely preoccupied with his body. Understanding this and maybe sensing that he had gone as far as he could with “body-oriented remedies,” he investigated the mind as a mechanism of healing. Encouraged by Thomas Edison’s assertion that his famous discoveries weren’t due to what he’d learned in school, but came from conscientiously observing ordinary events, Nakamura Sensei thought a remedy might lie within his psyche, and it might be unearthed in daily life.

After medical training in New York, he felt the secrets of life weren’t confined to Japanese spiritual approaches. As a result, he eventually succeeded in contacting Orison Swett Marden (1850-1924), an important philosopher and the author of How to Get What You Want. Marden, a Harvard trained M.D., is considered by some to be the initiator of the modern human potential movement in the USA. Marden's first work, Pushing to the Front, published in 1894, sold well. In 1897, he founded Success Magazine, which reached the large circulation (for that era) of almost a half-million. His periodical ran into monetary difficulties and ceased publication in 1912. In 1918, he created a new Success, which was swiftly growing in circulation when Marden passed away in 1924. His numerous books express the need for optimism and self-assurance. He had roughly two million words waiting in unpublished manuscripts when he died. Despite his prolific and pioneering efforts in the psychosomatic field, Marden’s method provided no cure for Nakamura Sensei’s disease.

Nakamura Sensei then heard of a metaphysician, who’d successfully treated an ailment of Edison’s, applying psychosomatic medicine. None of it worked for him. Yet from these mind-body theories, he developed a spiritual outlook and non-materialistic attitude that influenced him for the remainder of his days.

In 1911, he sailed across the Atlantic to Britain, where he attended an expensive psychology seminar lead by H. Addington Bruce called “Mental Activities and the Nervous System.” Bruce authored books like Adventurings in the Psychical, The Riddle of Personality, Scientific Mental Healing, and Sleep and Sleeplessness. From roughly 1903 and until America's entry into World War I, he wrote copious articles and books about psychology. During an era when extensive differences existed between psychologists as to subject matter and techniques of study, he developed a progressive portrayal of psychology, which emphasized the subconscious and the power of suggestion. Unlike more materialistic premises adopted by many academic psychologists, Bruce's pushing of the significance of environmental and spiritual factors in psychology lent scientific credence to new psychological approaches. It foretold psychology's change in the 1920s towards a greater stress on the effects of one’s environment on the mind and a greater concern with the unconscious.

Having probably read Bruce’s books, it’s easy to see why Saburo wanted to attend a seminar with such a well-known lecturer. At the conference, the speaker concluded: “If you have an illness, forget it. That’s the secret to curing a disease.” Saburo wasn’t satisfied with Bruce’s explanation, so he visited him.

“I’m at a loss. I can’t seem to forget my illness. Please show me how to forget it.”

“Well, you just need to keep trying,” the seminar leader said.

“I’ve tried many times, but . . .”

Bruce didn’t have another answer, and they quarreled. Saburo grew angry; he got up and kicked the door before leaving the room. He later recalled thinking that lecturing people, without first showing them how to do what you’re asking of them, was as effective as not speaking at all. Even today many people teach various subjects in just that way, and this became a catalyst for his practical approach to teaching mind and body unification.

Inasmuch as he was in Europe, he resolved to keep investigating the young European science of psychology, common themes from which he later adapted to his teachings. His research into psychology and philosophy spread across France, Germany, and Belgium—with tuberculosis haunting his every step.

About the Author: H. E. Davey Sensei is the Director of the Sennin Foundation Center for Japanese Cultural Arts, located in the San Francisco Bay Area (http://www.senninfoundation.com/). In 2001, he wrote the first and only book in English about Nakamura Tempu Sensei and his system of Japanese yoga and meditation. The book is out of print, but autographed BRAND NEW copies can be purchased exclusively from the Sennin Foundation Center. Supplies are limited, and if you’d like to read more about how Japanese yoga can help you improve your health and realize your full potential, order a copy of Japanese Yoga: The Way of Dynamic Meditation here: http://www.senninfoundation.com/davey_yoga.html