It’s been quite a year, hasn’t it? In the light of the pandemic, I made the life-changing decision to move to Taiwan with my partner.That’s taken up a lot of time and space, from quarantine in July to looking for a place to live, a place to work and finally, this week, shipping over our elderly cat from Malaysia. In the meantime, I got to finish my second book.

In the light of all these changes, I also came to a decision about Sayoshi.com.  I think it was 2018 that I launched Sayoshi.com, an online directory for practitioners of Japanese acupuncture but I didn’t put in enough time to really make it grow and few of the community that did register made much of their listings. As it was pretty much a solo project, I’ve decided to close this part of it for now and concentrate on other areas concerning Japanese acupuncture (and exploring
Taiwan!).

One of these projects is Sayoshi Books, a self-publishing imprint devoted to producing books about Japanese acupuncture and moxibustion. 2020
started very well for me with my first book about Ontake Warm Bamboo (and then…pandemic!).Next year, Sayoshi Books will launch my second, the first detailed exploration of Hirata Zone Therapy in English.

In the spring, we have scheduled The String Method, by Felip Caudet, with a foreword by Lorraine Wilcox. Felip’s book explores how to locate
effective points for moxibustion by using proportional measuring with string. Much of this is based on the teachings of Isaburo Fukaya.

Sayoshi Books is not a conventional publishing house—it’s more a guiding process to help JAM-focused authors self-publish. If you’re
interested in self-publishing your next book, do contact me. I hope to share the hard-learned lessons of self-publishing with other like-minded authors.

From next week, visitors to Sayoshi.com will be  redirected to the new Sayoshi page here. In the meantime, The Sayoshi brand will continue with interviews on Japanese acupuncture on YouTube and new books on the imprint. On a personal note, I do feel sadness at closing the directory down. It was a dream of mine for many years but it’s simply not a job for one person. If there are members out there who would contemplate investing in and running the directory, then let me know, and maybe we can get the thing started again. In the meantime, I’d like to thank all our 200 members for your support along the way. I’d like to finish with a Merry Christmas to all – well, at least as merry as it can be given such a dire year. Here’s wishing you all hope and renewal for 2021.