In Japan in the 1950s, ordinary people did not have a bathroom, so people could only go to the public bath for daily bathing. In addition to bathing, massage and other services would also be provided.
The inventor of the first massage chair, Nobuo Fujimoto (founder of FUJIIRYOKI), was just a salesman of ceramic tile cleaning brushes. These public baths were his target users, so he often visited public baths. With time went by, he began to find that almost every people who came to the bath would call a massage service after the bath. But Massage therapists provided one-on-one massage services, which requiring massive manpower. As a result, it occurred to Fujimoto Nobuo that whether machines can replace manual massage?
Since then, Fujimoto Nobuo began to embark on the invention of massage chair. For his initial research, materials came from garbage, such as wood from old furniture used as the seat and back of the massage chair, discarded car steering wheels used as switches to control the massage site, bicycle chains used as the running track of the massage ball, and rubber hollow balls of soft baseball used as massage heads, etc.
After repeated explorations, attempts and adjustments, he successfully developed the world's first massage chair. However, because of the condition constraints and technology limitation, the massage chair needed to be controlled by manually rotating the car steering wheel next to the chair when adjusting the massage part, and the "massage head" is moved around by electric control. So strictly speaking, this massage chair should be the world's first wooden semi-automatic massage chair.
In spite of this, the use of machines instead of manual massage has become a reality, and the emergence of massage chairs has also brought great shock to Japan at that time. Subsequently, massage chairs have become "good helpers" for Japanese public baths at that time to attract customers.
The emergence of new things suddenly attracted the majority of Japanese consumers. Although only used in the bathhouse, the massage chair began to be popular, which also stimulated more people to study the massage chair.
In 1962, a Japanese company successfully developed the world's first "fully automatic massage chair", which was also a milestone in the history of the development of massage chairs.
