Sugiyama Wa’ichi 杉山和一 (1610–1694), known in Japanese-medicine history as Sugiyama Kengyō 杉山検校 (“Master Sugiyama, Kengyō-rank”), was the most famous blind acupuncturist of Edo-period Japan and the inventor of the kanshin-hō 管鍼法 (“pipe-needle method”) — a guide-tube technique that allowed precise insertion-depth control and which remains, to this day, the standard Japanese acupuncture method in distinction to the continental free-hand technique.
Sugiyama was born in Tsu 津 (modern Mie Prefecture, Ise province) into the samurai family of Sugiyama Gondayū 杉山権太夫 of the Ise-Tsu clan. He lost his sight in early childhood (the cause is variously given as smallpox or eye-disease) and, in the strict pre-modern Japanese social system, was directed into one of the recognized occupations open to the blind: moxibustion, acupuncture, massage (anma 按摩), or biwa-bōshi itinerant lute-musicianship. He was sent to Edo to study acupuncture under Yamase Takuichi 山瀬琢一 (a disciple of the Ming-influenced Irie-ryū 入江流), but reportedly proved a poor pupil and was dismissed. The well-known origin-legend has him praying at the Enoshima 江ノ島 shrine to Benzaiten 弁財天 for inspiration; stumbling on the path, he picked up a pine-needle wrapped in a fallen leaf and conceived from this the invention of the kuda-bari 管鍼 (pipe-needle) — the guide-tube that allows a blind practitioner to seat the needle precisely without relying on the visual estimation that the traditional Chinese free-hand technique requires.
Whether or not the legend is historical, the technique is. Sugiyama formalized it, founded an acupuncture school for the blind in Edo, and attracted the patronage of the fifth Tokugawa shōgun, Tsunayoshi 徳川綱吉, who in 1682 (Tenna 2) appointed him kengyō 検校 — the highest official rank open to blind people in Edo Japan — and in 1693 (Genroku 6) granted him a residence at Honjo Ichinohashi 本所一橋 and chartered the Sugiyama-ryū hari-jutsu kōshūjo 杉山流鍼術講習所 (Sugiyama School Acupuncture Training Institute) — the first systematic professional-training school for blind acupuncturists in Japan, with branches that eventually numbered 45 across the country.
His principal extant work in classical Chinese is the Xuǎnzhēn sānyào jí 選針三要集 KR3ee052, two juan of acupuncture doctrine and point-anatomy that transmits the SòngYuánMíng continental canon into Edo Japan through the Irie-ryū filter. Sugiyama’s autobiographical bá in that work identifies his teacher as Master Irie 入江先生 (Irie Toemon 入江豐明), under whom he studied for three years before treating himself. After his death his lineage continued through the Sugiyama-ryū 杉山流 — a tradition that briefly faltered in the Meiji period when state-licensing reforms closed the blind-acupuncturist schools, but was revived from 1878 and persists into the present in some 69 government-funded acupuncture schools, many of them training the visually impaired (Hinrichs & Barnes 2013, 304–305).
Sugiyama is enshrined at the Edo Ehimasu-Inari 江島杉山神社 in Sumida-ku, Tokyo, which preserves his residence and is a pilgrimage site for the modern Japanese acupuncture profession.