BY HEINER FRUEHAUF

Japanese Kanpo (“Chinese modalities”) medicine has in many ways distinguished itself as an independent school of Oriental medical practice. Although Kanpo practitioners generally derive their inspiration from the Chinese classics, they have developed their own set of diagnostic procedures, therapeutic methods, and medical theories, certain aspects of which vary quite drastically from standard approaches adopted by their colleagues in modern China. To dismiss the Japanese system as an unorthodox branch of Chinese medicine, however, would belittle the age-old Japanese practice of “creative imitation” as baseless esotericism, and miss important aspects of classical Chinese theory that have been preserved and illuminated by the Japanese approach.