Health and Beauty

With 2020 having become “The Year Of Apart, Together”, I’ve started a series on finding ways to keep your mental and physical well-being in check, even if you have to do it socially-distanced and online, preferably with local practitioners and groups around Greater Tokyo and the rest of Japan. Tom Wada knows a lot about being flexible and making a trying time’s negatives into a positive way of life. While he’s currently the very cheerful head yoga guru of Sattva Yoga Tokyo at International Yoga Center (IYC) in Tokyo’s trendy Omotesando district, his life five years ago was a very different story. I was a typical Japanese salaryman for about 15, 16 years maybe. At some point as you might guess, I had a meltdown and I found that yoga was the thing that helped me through the whole process. Tom was born in Osaka, but spent pretty much his whole childhood and teenage years in the United States and tells his ‘origin story’ with the same tone and candor of finding out Spiderman is really fresh-faced teen, Peter Parker. I had this friend that introduced me to yoga around the time of my meltdown, but I kinda used to…