‘Chouang Tzu, the great Chinese philosopher, said 2,500 years ago: “True human beings breathe from their heels, whereas ordinary people breathe from their throat.”

Who breathes from their heels nowadays? People breathe from their chest, their shoulders or their throat. The world is full of these invalids who ignore themselves.’¹Tsuda Itsuo, The Non-Doing, Chap. I, 2013, Yume Editions (Paris), p. 15

This is how Tsuda sensei begins his first book, published in 1973, setting the tone by quoting the philosopher who most accompanied him throughout his life.

Tsuda sensei was a relentless researcher and a man of great culture. Throughout his life, he worked tirelessly to enable human beings to free themselves from what burdens and hinders them. Starting from his personal quest for freedom of thought, it was ultimately a philosophical understanding of human beings that emerged through his practices: Aikido, Seitai, Nō… And Tsuda sensei spread this philosophy of human beings, this path, primarily through his books²nine books (plus one posthumous) published in French between 1973 and 1984 – still available[ – then in English from 2013 to 2025]and his teaching in dojos over a period of ten years. But there was a more secret medium that he took up in the last years of his life: calligraphy.

On this subject, he presented himself as an “amateur calligrapher” in the Zen sense, where, like many masters of martial arts, Ikebana, Chadō, etc., he used calligraphy to communicate a state of mind and convey a philosophy.

Tsuda sensei took a unique approach to calligraphy, a step aside of a sort. Due to the constraints of the time, he chose to trace with wax. A constraint that led to surpassing oneself. The ideograms are traced with hot wax using a brush, then the fabric is dyed, and finally the wax is removed. What remains is the trace, an empty trace.

The desire to express the inexpressible, to communicate what cannot be communicated³The Non-Doing (op. cit.), Foreword, p. 9

In his books, Tsuda sensei strives to make concepts and principles that often seem very distant from our culture accessible to readers. He builds bridges, talking to us about ordinary situations that reveal a much deeper background. This is what makes reading his books an enjoyable and straightforward experience.

Calligraphy is different. It is a more “esoteric” teaching, in the sense that it requires an effort of understanding on our part, to take an active part in it. Yet Tsuda sensei conveys an essential teaching for those who want to delve deeper.

It was after the age of sixty, in France, that he began tracing calligraphies and dispersing the seeds of what had nourished his journey and his history.

His story begins in 1914 in Korea, under Japanese rule, where his parents, who were members of the nobility, had settled. At the age of sixteen, he rebelled against his father’s authority and set out in search of freedom of thought. Arriving in Paris in 1934, he studied ethnology and sinology at the Sorbonne under Marcel Mauss and Marcel Granet. The war interrupted his studies and he had to return to Japan. It was only after the end of the conflict that he became more deeply interested in the cultural aspects of his country and began studying Nō with Master Kanze Kasetsu and Seitai with Noguchi Haruchika sensei. Hired as an interpreter for André Nocquet, who had just arrived in Japan to study Aikido, he was captivated by the personality of O-sensei Ueshiba Morihei and by the art he discovered. Thus, until O-sensei’s death, he practised daily at the Hombu Dōjō in Tōkyō.

Tsuda sensei often said that the masters he had known had each dug different wells, but that at the bottom of each well flows the same water and that they communicate with each other.⁴The Non-Doing (op. cit.), Foreword, p. 12

So, when he returned to France in the early 1970s, he initially focused on spreading Seitai and Aikido, while beginning to write his first book. He started in 1978 to introduce his students to his calligraphies.

A vast culture

The hundred or so calligraphies he traced express an entire culture, as many of Tsuda Itsuo’s calligraphies refer to texts by Zhuangzi and Laozi, or suggest them through an ideogram or drawing. Others are Zen sayings, proverbs, or Chinese or Japanese cultural references popular at the time.

For example, the calligraphy The true hermit lives in the heart of great cities is a well-known phrase from a poem by Wang Kang-Ju (Eastern Jin dynasty, 317-420). Tsuda Itsuo quoted this text several times, notably in this passage from his book The Path of Less: