Hara (tanden)

Hara (Japanese: 腹: abdomen, should not be translated as "stomach" to avoid confusing it with the organ). In the Japanese medical tradition and in Japanese martial arts traditions, the word Hara is used as a technical term for a specific area (physical/anatomical) or energy field (physiological/energetic) of the body.

In the medical tradition of Japan, hara refers to the soft belly, i.e. the area defined vertically by the lower edge of the sternum and the upper edge of the pubis and laterally by the lower border of the ribcage and the anterior iliac crest respectively. It corresponds with that area of the peritoneum, which is not obscured by the ribcage, and thus more or less coincides with the viscera covered by the greater omentum.

Similar to western medical practitioners, Japanese physicians and medical therapists use the abdomen (Hara) in diagnosis to determine the health or otherwise of the patient, particularly, but not exclusively, the state of the abdominal organs or tissues and the related energy fields. While in western medicine the palpation of the abdomen (abdominal examination) is aimed at the physical organs palpatable in that area to assess their size, shape, consistency, reaction to pressure and such, in eastern medicine the Hara is seen as an area that reflects the state of all the organs (physically palpable in the abdomen or not), their energetic as well as their physical state, and their complex functional relationships with each other. In diagnosis and treatment, the Hara is partitioned in areas, each of which is considered - on the basis of empirical evidence - to represent one of the (ten, eleven or twelve) vital organs AND their functional energy fields. The details of this basic model of Hara diagnosis may differ from school to school, depending on which underlying philosophical, physiological, pathological or therapeutic model of Japanese or Chinese Medicine is being used (e.g. Five Elements, Five Phases, Yin and Yang, Zang Fu or Meridian theory), but the underlying principles remain the same.

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