What "An Illustrated Guide to Kampo" Taught Me About Reading My Body's Messages

Zhou Chuncai's An Illustrated Guide to Kampo is the book behind this personal record of what I've actually started doing in daily life at 66. The word "manga" usually suggests light reading, but it turned out to be a genuinely thorough introduction — covering yin-yang and the five elements, qi/blood/fluid theory, the four diagnostic methods, and food-as-medicine, all within a single volume. Before I retired, I studied similar theory at acupuncture and herbal medicine college, and the diagrams I once memorised for exams landed very differently reading them again.

An image pairing the yin-yang symbol with life shuttling between the UK and Japan.

Feeling yin and yang through a life split between two countries

The book's opening chapter is about yin-yang theory: the idea that everything is held together by a balance between two opposing qualities. Since I started splitting my life between the UK and Japan, this idea has become concrete for me as seasonal adaptation. What my body wants to eat, and what rhythm my sleep falls into, is completely different during the damp cold of a British winter versus a humid Japanese summer. I used to think "I'm the same person, so I should live the same way" — now I try to let where I am shape how I live, and I've come to think that adjusting itself is a form of self-care. In practice, during the more yin, colder British winter, I eat more warming food — root vegetables, slow-cooked dishes — go to bed earlier, sleep longer, and don't push myself to be more active than the season calls for. In the more yang, hotter Japanese summer, I lean towards water-rich vegetables and fruit, save anything active for the cooler morning and evening hours, and treat the hottest part of the day as a time to rest rather than push through. Same goal of "living healthily," but what that actually looks like shifts with the yin-yang of wherever I am.

Feeling food-as-medicine through greenhouse aubergines

Midway through the book, there's a careful explanation of how the five internal organs connect to the properties of food — the idea that every food has a "nature" (warming or cooling) and a "flavour," and that colours and tastes correspond to particular organs. This year I've been growing aubergines in the greenhouse, and aubergine is considered a cooling food in this system, with its purple colour traditionally linked to particular organs as well. I used to eat things simply because "they're supposed to be good for you." Now, standing over a freshly picked aubergine, I pause and ask whether it actually suits the season I'm in before it goes on the table.

Reading illness as a letter from the body, not an enemy, through "pattern diagnosis"

Buddhism counts illness as one of the four great sufferings, and reading this book shifted how I hold that particular one, more than it changed the suffering itself. In Chinese medicine, before anything is named as a disease, the whole current state of the body is read through four diagnostic methods — observation, listening/smelling, questioning, and pulse-taking — to arrive at a "pattern." I've noticed proper nouns escaping me more often lately. Instead of writing that off as simply "getting old," I try asking what my current state of qi might be telling me. When I was younger I saw illness as an enemy to be defeated quickly; now I think of it more as a short letter arriving from my own body.

An image combining the four diagnostic methods with a hand applying moxa to a point on the leg.

Small acts of self-care to steady qi, blood, and fluid

The book explains that a great many complaints trace back to an imbalance among three elements: qi, blood, and fluid. Drawing on what I learned during my acupuncture and herbal medicine training, when I notice tiredness lingering into the next day, I now reach for a moxibustion stick and apply it to a point on my leg — Zusanli (ST36) — without much deliberation. I won't claim dramatic effects, but simply naming my state — "maybe my qi is running low this week (no real energy to speak of)" — and meeting it directly seems, on its own, to bring back a sense of calm.

Letting "supplementing what's lacking" sit alongside "knowing what's enough"

One chapter in the book sets out the treatment principle of supplementation — addressing what's actually deficient. Reading it, I found it overlapped with how I try to reduce financial anxiety. The chronic worry of "will I have enough" is one I recognise in myself. Rather than trying to keep accumulating out of fear of shortage, I try to identify what's genuinely lacking right now, and supplement only that much. From years of investing, I've found that peace of mind comes less from endlessly growing what I have, and more from working out what daily life actually requires and stopping there.

Comparing Eastern and Western views of medicine

Living in the UK, I keep noticing that the tradition of herbalism and natural remedies here arrives at similar places to Chinese medicine, by a different logic. Western medicine tends to focus on identifying and removing the cause of a disease; the Chinese medicine this book describes focuses instead on restoring balance across the whole body. It isn't a contest over which is correct — having both yardsticks lets me look at my own body from more than one angle, which is something living between the two cultures has taught me directly.

Thinking about living in the present through the cycle of the five elements

A diagram of wood, fire, earth, metal, and water generating and restraining one another in a cycle.

In five-element theory, wood, fire, earth, metal, and water generate and restrain one another in an ongoing cycle. Reading this, I began to think that happiness might not be a fixed state reached and held onto, but something more like this cycle — the act of continuing to change. Doing today what can be done today, enjoying today what can be enjoyed today — because tomorrow's cycle will already be a little different from today's.

Making the act of recording itself part of self-care

I notice my memory slipping more often these days, and leaning on illustrated explanations like this book's has made writing down changes in my own condition, here on the blog, into a new form of self-care for me. It struck me recently that putting a physical state into words is not so different from conducting the "questioning" step of diagnosis on myself.

I'm really just writing my own record here, but if it ends up being something like a quiet companion walking beside someone else, I'd be glad.

Balancing yin and yang, food as medicine, reading the body's pattern, steadying qi and blood and fluid, supplementing what's lacking while knowing what's enough — none of this amounts to dramatic treatment, but at 66, these feel like habits worth keeping so I don't miss the small letters my body keeps sending.

The book I mentioned here:

An Illustrated Guide to Kampo by Zhou Chuncai (Japanese edition, Ido-no-Nihon-sha)

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About the author, Zhou Chuncai

An image evoking 1950s–60s Beijing, where traditional culture met the modern everyday.

Zhou Chuncai was born in Beijing in 1957. Working as a painter, freelance editor, and writer, he has spent much of his career translating difficult subjects — the I Ching, traditional Chinese medicine, classical philosophy — into accessible comic form. This book is one of those works; its Japanese edition, supervised and translated by Shoji Yoshimoto, was published by Ido-no-Nihon-sha in 2004. The China of Zhou's youth, the 1950s through 1970s, was a period where traditional culture and rapid modernisation were pulling against each other. Within that environment, he developed a distinctive style of reinterpreting Chinese culture through comparison with Western perspectives, and his work has since been translated abroad. In Japan, the 1990s and 2000s saw growing interest in kampo and complementary medicine, alongside a wave of "learn through manga" educational books. This book arrived as part of that wave, carrying the theory of Chinese medicine — often locked behind technical vocabulary — within reach of an ordinary reader.