About two years ago, I had decided that I needed to restart from scratch my ”Story of Shiatsu” project. Ever since then, I’ve been reading plenty of materials but I couldn’t write anything. Not one line. I really dreaded writing for this project. And then I discovered Sean Hsiang-lin Lei’s book, Neither Donkey Nor Horse, Medicine in the Struggle over China’s Modernity. Suddenly, so much information I gathered for the past years of my documentation for writing the Story of Shiatsu started to fall into place. I have decided to update the title of my project as a sign of appreciation for the structure and the inspiration I found in Lei’s book to challenge the conventional understanding of the history of Shiatsu. In this particular post, I set the starting point of my story of Shiatsu around the turn of the 21st century when the term Shiatsu is mentioned for the first times in printed articles or books. Following is a concise summary of the intricate and extremely under-explored history of Shiatsu in the 21st century. For conventional reasons, I propose the delimitation of the history of Shiatsu into four chapters. I evaluate the significance of each chapter by analyzing five indicators: socio-historical context, dominant figure, milestone publication, proposed direction, achievements and shortcomings. In future posts and also in the book once it will be finalized, the focus of my Story of Shiatsu will be extended to much earlier periods and I will delve into the much larger context of history of East Asian medicine.