Why do I fight? Japanese Way of Biohacking for Wellbeing
Tateki Matsuda — Mixed Martial Artist, Founder @ HOLOLIFE Center Japan
Tateki is a proud founder of the Biohacker Center Japan. Born and raised in Tokyo, Japan, Tateki originally came to the U.S as an international student for education and built a career in Mixed Martial Arts at the same time.
His professional and athletic background provides him with a unique skill set, enabling success in challenging and changing environments. Specialized in academic knowledge and professional experience in sports and fitness, Tateki works as a holistic health consultant and his customers range from elite performers to top models.
Tateki Matsuda, an MMA fighter and health consultant, offers a unique
Think lightly of yourself and think deeply of the world. The best biohacking is what you learn; a samurai’s best weapon is not the sword, but the heart and mind.
Summary
- Incorporate physical movement and corrective exercises, such as shoulder releases and lung-opening stretches, to improve mobility and prepare the body for optimal daily performance.
- Prioritize biochemical individuality and self-quantification, recognizing that physiological responses to food vary so significantly that a single "perfect diet" does not exist.
- Use the seven virtues of Bushido—Justice, Courage, Benevolence, Respect, Honesty, Honor, and Loyalty—as a foundational moral framework for achieving mental and spiritual wellbeing.
- Integrate the concept of Ikigai by balancing personal wellbeing with "welldoing," which involves contributing to the lives of others to create a sustainable cycle of growth and purpose.
- Adopt a mindset of resilience by viewing physical struggle and challenges as essential tools for self-discovery and developing a deeper understanding of empathy and human connection.
Article
Why I Fight: Bushido And The Japanese Way Of Biohacking For Wellbeing
At Biohacker Summit 2022 Helsinki, Tateki Matsuda Offered More Than Performance Advice
On Friday, 3 June 2022, at Biohacker Summit 2022 Helsinki in Finland, Tateki Matsuda did not begin with slides or abstractions. He began with bodies.
Before speaking about longevity, optimization or the future of health, Matsuda asked the room to move. He guided the audience through shoulder releases, thoracic opening drills, breathing patterns and neurological exercises in which the eyes and head travelled in opposing directions. It was an unusual opening, but it made a larger point with striking clarity: wellbeing, in his view, was not an idea to be admired. It was a discipline to be practiced.
Matsuda’s presentation, titled *Why Do I Fight? Japanese Way of Biohacking for Wellbeing*, stood apart not because it rejected modern biohacking, but because it challenged its emptier promises. Technology mattered, he argued. Data mattered. Self-tracking mattered. But none of it meant much without character, purpose and a reason to live longer in the first place.
A Fighter’s Philosophy, Forged Between Tokyo And Boston
Matsuda, founder of Biohacker Center Japan, brought a biography that resisted easy categorisation. Born and raised in Tokyo, he moved to the United States as an international student and built a parallel life in Mixed Martial Arts. He trained as a professional MMA fighter while studying sports movement science and later earning a master’s degree in applied nutrition. He also held certifications in Functional Movement Systems and StrongFirst kettlebell practice, blending academic training with the hard evidence of combat sports.
That unusual combination gave his talk an authority that was less polished than lived. He spoke not as a wellness marketer, but as someone who had tested ideas in the cage, in the gym and in the laboratory of his own body.
“What I do in the cage determines the quality of what I do in my life,” Matsuda said. “I fight to grow as a person and to understand the pain of others so that I can show up and contribute to the world.”
It was the kind of line that could have sounded theatrical in another speaker’s mouth. Here, it landed with force.
The Body As The First Site Of Change
Much of the early part of the session focused on physical readiness. Matsuda demonstrated corrective mobility work designed to reduce shoulder tension, improve lung expansion and enhance thoracic movement. These were not framed as cosmetic interventions, nor even merely athletic ones. They were presented as prerequisites for living well.
He also introduced drills that linked mobility to the nervous system, including movements where participants looked upward while drawing the head downward, or pulled the head laterally while fixing the gaze in the opposite direction. Such exercises, he suggested, could improve mobility not only through stretching but through neurological recalibration.
The message was practical and unsentimental. Before chasing advanced protocols, fix posture. Before obsessing over longevity, learn to breathe. Before searching for the next upgrade, inhabit the body you already have.
There Is No Perfect Diet, Only Personal Evidence
If Matsuda’s moral framework came from Japanese tradition, his nutritional argument leaned heavily on modern science. He cited a 2015 paper from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, which found that 800 individuals displayed dramatically different post-meal glucose responses to the same foods. A meal that produced stable blood sugar in one person could trigger a spike in another.
For Matsuda, that study was transformative. It dismantled the seductive fantasy that there might be one ideal diet for everyone.
“Biochemical individuality must be prioritized because there is no one perfect diet,” he said. “We must use self-quantification and trial and error to figure out what our own optimization is.”
It was a rebuke to the absolutism that often defines nutrition culture. Keto, paleo, vegan, fasting, carb cycling. Matsuda treated them not as doctrines, but as tools whose value depended on the person using them. Lifestyle, sleep quality, breathing patterns, activity levels, hormonal rhythms and mental state all shaped the body’s response.
He argued that self-quantification, from glucose monitoring to genetic decoding, could help transform nutrition from generic dieting into genuine personalisation. Tools such as Functional Movement Systems, SelfDecode and glucose monitors were part of that process, as were posture-supporting devices like the Finnish-designed Salli saddle chair and doping-free medical grade supplements used by elite athletes.
Yet even here, he struck a note of restraint. The world, he said, already had “the latest and greatest technology”. The more urgent question was what people intended to do with the extra years they hoped to gain.
The Missing Question In Longevity Culture
This was where Matsuda’s talk became something larger than a health seminar.
“We already have the latest and greatest technology, but if you live twenty or thirty years longer, what will you do?” he asked. “You must find your Ikigai and your reason for being.”
It was perhaps the central challenge of the presentation. Biohacking often asks how to live longer, stronger, leaner, sharper. Matsuda asked why.
He spoke about the shallowness of goals that dissolve on contact with reality: the six-pack pursued as salvation, the body treated as a before-and-after image, the fantasy that one external achievement might produce an entirely new self. Life, he said, was not a screenshot on Instagram. It was movement, pain, repetition, effort and renewal.
In that sense, his invocation of *Ikigai*, the Japanese idea of reason for being, was not decorative. It was corrective. Longevity without purpose, he implied, was merely extension. To optimise life without defining its meaning was to perfect the vessel and neglect the voyage.
Bushido As A Moral Operating System
From there, Matsuda turned to Bushido, the traditional samurai code, presenting its seven virtues as a moral architecture for wellbeing: Justice, Courage, Benevolence, Respect, Honesty, Honor and Loyalty.
In his telling, these were not relics of feudal Japan but durable principles for modern life. Justice required moral action, not rhetoric. Courage meant doing what was right, not what was easy. Benevolence transformed strength into service. Respect eliminated the need for cruelty. Honesty rooted character in integrity. Honor demanded internal accountability. Loyalty began with truthfulness to oneself and extended outward to others.
“True courage is doing what is right,” Matsuda said. “It is living life completely and wonderfully, perceiving what is right, and having the strength to follow through with it.”
The appeal of this framework lay in how sharply it contrasted with contemporary self-optimization culture, which can become trapped in vanity, control and private gain. Matsuda proposed a different model, one in which wellbeing was inseparable from ethical conduct.
His vision was not only about feeling better, performing better or living longer. It was about becoming someone capable of contributing more.
Wellbeing And Welldoing
One of the most compelling ideas in the talk was Matsuda’s pairing of wellbeing with what he called “welldoing”. The self could not be the final destination of health. Personal resilience had to feed outward into service, empathy and social contribution.
Drawing on remarks he had heard from Teemu Arina and invoking the samurai swordsman Miyamoto Musashi, Matsuda described a philosophy of ego reduction and world engagement. Musashi’s advice, he reminded the audience, was to “think lightly of yourself and think deeply of the world”.
That line appeared to unlock something essential in his own thinking. His fight, he explained, was not only physical. It was existential. To endure struggle, to understand pain, to wake up and begin again each morning despite failure or fear, was to build the capacity to meet others with greater depth.
In this account, the cage was not an arena of pure aggression. It was a crucible for humility.
No Shortcuts, Only Daily Practice
Again and again, Matsuda returned to one stubborn truth: there was no shortcut.
“There is no shortcut to optimization,” he said. “Every day is your most important moment as a biohacker to learn through self-experimentation in your daily life.”
The line carried the severity of a fighter’s ethic and the patience of a coach’s instruction. His approach rejected miracle thinking. It demanded experimentation, observation and consistency. It also acknowledged difference, especially in relation to biological rhythms, including the need to account for women’s hormonal cycles rather than imposing rigid universal protocols.
This insistence on daily refinement gave the talk its underlying seriousness. Biohacking, in Matsuda’s account, was not a consumer identity. It was a practice of attention.
A Japanese Vision Of Longevity Beyond Metrics
By the close of the session, Matsuda had woven together a strikingly hybrid worldview: cutting-edge self-quantification alongside ancient moral philosophy, glucose variability alongside Bushido, mobility drills alongside Ikigai. He referenced Japanese ideas such as *Hara Hachibu*, eating until 80 per cent full, and *Shinrin-yoku*, or forest bathing, as part of a broader cultural inheritance that treated health not as a single intervention, but as a way of living.
His final claim was both modest and profound. The best biohacking, he suggested, was not found in a device or supplement, but in the mind and spirit that guided their use.
At Biohacker Summit 2022 Helsinki, Tateki Matsuda offered a vision of wellbeing that was tougher, deeper and more demanding than the market usually allows. It asked for mobility and metrics, yes, but also conscience. It asked for resilience, but also reverence. It asked, above all, that people live not merely longer, but better, and for something beyond themselves.
That was why he fought. And in Helsinki, for one compelling hour, he made the case that the rest of us should ask ourselves the same question.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2022 Helsinki