The person behind it ABOUT
Head of AGO method Japan / President, AGO global Inc.
Taku Yuyama
He built the AGO method® — “Butterfly touch” — which works from the jaw joint to set the lower third of the face. He still sees clients at the salon in Aoyama, Tokyo, and teaches the practitioners who carry it.
- In manual therapy
- 20years
- People treated
- 70,000
- Practitioners taught
- 450and more
- Since the school opened
- 6years
No miracle hands.
There is no shortage of miraculous hands in this world — a technique that only the founder can perform. We do not call that a good technique.
Looking at other schools, one thing kept repeating. The founder is known. The students are not. Which means that when the founder is gone, the technique goes with him.
Japan has an old way of protecting an art: isshi-sōden — the secret handed to one heir, one in each generation. It keeps the art pure. It also keeps it small, and one funeral can end it.
So the AGO method was built the other way round: on a theory that anyone can learn, practise, and arrive at the same result with. What was chased was safety and reproducibility, to the last degree.
There was a second condition. This work is long hours, and it costs the body. For it to give a woman freedom of time and money, it had to be a technique that tires nobody and asks for no strength. So it was built for a woman to perform — which is also why a person can still be doing it in their sixties.
And clients do not attach to a technique. They attach to the practitioner in front of them. We teach character as hard as we teach the hands.
What was keeping it in
Japan has some of the finest hands-on work anywhere. Almost none of it is written down in English.
Nobody decided to keep it here. There was simply no one to translate it, and no reason to while the room was full. A generation of technique has stayed inside one language by default.
A technique that cannot cross a language is not being protected. It is being left to shrink.
That is why it was written down in the first place — as physical steps, with the theory taken out, so that what passes between two people is the hand and not the mystique. And it is why those steps are now in English.
If it can only be done by one man, in one city, in one language, then we have not finished the work.
Taku Yuyama
The road here
-
01
From an office job into manual therapy
He left university for a listed company, and found no place for himself there. Everyone around him was abler, and he could not feel he was worth anything. Looking for something a man like that could still be useful for, he noticed what everyone was saying about Japan: that it was about to grow old. So he chose manual therapy. Training under a clinic, he worked his way up to being trusted with twenty or thirty people a day.
-
02
The wall of going it alone
An employee performs the treatment the clinic prescribes, and nothing else. He went independent to follow the thought “this could be better” — and found it far harder than expected. Looking for technique that genuinely produced results, he travelled the whole country to study.
-
03
Four hundred people a month, and the jaw joint
Testing and testing, he noticed that working through the relationship between the jaw joint and the autonomic nervous system changed both how much improved and how fast. From there: hypothesis, test, disproof, repeated — and everything he could read, anatomy included.
-
NOW
More than 450 people now carry it
People who had never done this work now run beauty and health seminars in their own regions, or look after company owners and actors as their personal practitioner. The ambition is larger than it was when he was treating alone.
How the three techniques came about
A face out of true is a body out of true. So you set the body at its root. Three techniques came from that one idea.
-
Facial correction
AGO Golden Face Line Method
What if you loosened the skull and the joints completely, and reassembled them like a puzzle?
He was running a clinic when a woman came in with a jaw joint disorder. Wanting to fix it, trying one thing after another, that thought arrived one day. He tried it, and was certain he could make the adjustment he had in mind. The jaw disorder improved — and then it turned out to answer a whole range of complaints about the face.
-
Visceral correction
AGO Visceral Manipulation Method
When the organs are in good condition, a person is healthy — and beauty comes with it.
As more of his clients arrived with disorders of the autonomic nervous system, he turned to the gut, the barometer of how well a person is. Reading everything from the chest to the pelvis as one viscera, he worked out block theory, a way of explaining a distorted state rather than feeling for it. A healthy person has firmness in the skin, and comes down a size.
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Skeletal correction
AGO Perfect Alignment Method
The root of it is not the muscle. It is returning the skeleton to true.
Because the skeleton comes back to where it belongs, the twist, the stretch and the shortening go out of the muscle, and normal elasticity returns. This is the technique for taking pain away.
Written, and written about
The book
One minute a day of jaw exercises, and depression fades away (Japanese title: 1日1分アゴ体操で、うつがみるみる消えていく！)
A health book on what the jaw joint has to do with the state of mind and body. When a clenching habit stiffens the jaw, effort creeps into ordinary movement. The book sets out exercises to release it, starting from one minute a day.
- Publisher
- Kawade Shobo Shinsha
- Published
- 8 December 2022
- Format
- Hardback, 176 pages
Publishing as “a specialist in the jaw joint and the autonomic nervous system” led to editions in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau. The book is not a substitute for medical diagnosis or treatment.
Selected coverage
2026.09.22
Sankei Shimbun, morning edition
The book was covered in the book pages.
2025.02.07
Nikkei WOMAN, March 2025
The school appeared in a feature on starting again.
Nikkei BP (reproduced with permission)
2023.03.13
Forbes JAPAN
“How Taku Yuyama, a manual therapist turning over 100 million yen a year, uses Instagram.”
2025.06.28
Shukan Josei
A feature on the one-minute jaw exercise: what a jaw out of true does to body and mind, and what you can do yourself.
Shufu to Seikatsu Sha (reproduced with permission)
Radio
2025.10.06
Kaori Manabe — business frontiers
Appeared as a guest.
2024.06.15
MB’s Trend Report, episode 24
On how women in their thirties work, and what the AGO method could do about it.
The company
- Name
- AGO global Inc.
- President
- Taku Yuyama
- Head office
- 316 Aoyama 302, 3-1-6 Kita-Aoyama, Minato-ku, Tokyo 107-0061, Japan
- Telephone
- +81 90-3092-7966
- Business
- School / Lectures / Consulting / Franchise development / Development and sale of beauty and health products
History
Two ways in
To be treated, or to learn it. Either is a door.