Born in 1914 into a family of samurais, who had become captains of industry in the Meiji 
modernization period, Itsuo Tsuda rebelled, at the age of sixteen, against his father’s will to make him the heir of the family’s fortune. Refusing to follow the path that had been designated for him, he left his family and set off as a vagabond in search of the freedom of thought.
In 1934, having reconciled with his father, he decided to go to France to study, where he followed the teaching of Chinese scholar Marcel Granet and sociologist Marcel Mauss, until the outbreak of the Second World War.
Tsuda will recall how important these years were, in relation to the work he was later to undertake in Europe:
‘[My masters] taught me,’ he says, ‘to dig out a relevant fact from inextricable contexts, and to question well-established values.’
In 1940, he was called up and had to go back to Japan.
After the war, while working for Air-France in Tōkyō, he took up an interest in the cultural aspects of Japan and in particular the art of Nō reciting, studying with Master Hosada from the Kanze Kasetsu School.
In his book The Non-Doing, he writes:
‘Japan has managed to maintain its cultural autonomy thanks to its distance from the European sphere of influence. Let us designate the philosophy of action as the underlying bases of its traditions. The essence of action is respiration, breath, ki.’
During this post-war period, around the age of thirty, Itsuo Tsuda also began studying Seitai with Master Noguchi, a learning which lasted about twenty years. He is forty-five when he meets Master Ueshiba, the founder of Aikido, to whom he will remain a student until his master’s death in 1969.
In the foreword of The Non-Doing, Itsuo Tsuda recounts:
In 1970, at the age of fifty-six, I abandoned my job and launched myself into an adventure which showed no promise or guarantee. After travelling through the United States, I arrived in Paris.’
Once in Paris, Itsuo Tsuda began to write and developed a passion for this work; he started to spread his manuscripts using whatever means that were at hand. A group of people, who had organised a demonstration in his favour in 1969, invited him to use an association they had founded, which permitted him to get better acknowledged with and to consider the European state of mind. In 1973, his first book The Non-Doing was published by French editor Le Courrier du Livre (Paris).
His workshop calendar in 1983, ten years later, gives an indication of how active he was with introducing people to Katsugen Undo and Master Ueshiba’s Respiratory Practice across Europe. Nonetheless, during all these years, Master Tsuda, deceased in 1984, always regarded the chief part of his work to be writing.
He published nine books, in French: The Non-Doing; The Path of Less; The Science of the Particular; One; The Dialogue of Silence; The Unstable Triangle; Even if I do not think, I am; The Way of the Gods and Facing Science.