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Language: en
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Search for Meaning Across Borders
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‚A foreigner was like a white lion.‘
‚What is my ‚own thing‘?‘
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Let’s go to your biography a little bit.
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In 1989 you decided to go to Japan with Chetna and spent time with her then.
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Then you left again and you eventually came back to Japan.
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Just that time bridge.
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I think you may have gotten married to her in the meantime also to take us through that time.
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Ok, so in 1989 after we had been to Poona and it turns out this was the last time we saw Osho alive.
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In 1989 I think in July or so.
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We went to Japan and when we arrived in Japan …
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we could stay with her parents which was unusual. They were very open.
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Married.
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In Sapporo.
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And I knew that the things that I could do were very limited.
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So. Basically I could either work for a language school to teach English or German.
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Or I could be a mascot.
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A gigolo.
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Coffee shop. Not a gigolo. Like a mascot.
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You would go to this coffee shop or to this bar whatever from say 7pm until 11pm and because you were there people would come.
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You as a foreigner were there?
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You as a foreigner. I think Sapporo had at the time 1.8 million inhabitants and when I first went there …
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No, the second time I went there, I registered because I was legal there.
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Sapporo had five wards.
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So 400′ … maybe between three and four hundred thousand people in each ward.
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And in the ward where I registered the clerk just looked at me and he said,
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‚Did you know that you are the only registered foreigner in this ward?‘
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And I’m going … (swallows). One out of 300 or 400 thousand people.
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It was intense.
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Being a foreigner at the time was like somebody exhibiting a white lion or something like that
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and people would come there – to the ‚zoo‘ – to see you and to talk to you maybe say hello, practice their English. Both men and women.
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And I thought, ‚Man, I can’t do this.‘ I was really shy … still at the time. Not now.
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So, I thought, ‚I can’t do that. There’s no way I can do that.‘
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Then another possibility was to sell jewelry or something on the street.
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I did that later. I didn’t want to do that.
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Or to teach English and then I checked some of the English schools in town.
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And the first one I went to immediately hired me.
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I’m thinking, ‚Oh no, now what am I going to do?‘
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So, I went to the local bookstore, Maruzen in Sapporo. Later it became one of my favorite places.
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They had incredible books on Japanese spirituality.
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And I bought books on English grammar to study.
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Because when I came, okay, my English was okay,
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but I didn’t really understand grammar well enough to teach it.
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So I studied and then I started to teach English as a second language.
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And then they asked me if I could teach German also. So I started to teach German.
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And then my visa was running out every …
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I don’t remember, every few months, every six months I could stay, or something, then had to go to Korea,
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spend a few days, come back, get another three months.
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Then I thought, ‚I can’t just do this all the time in and out of the country, not legal …
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let’s go to, maybe go to a place that is neutral for both of us.‘
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She didn’t like Germany. Japan: it was difficult for me to stay legally.
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I said, ‚Why don’t we go to the States?‘
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So we spent a year in the US, first in San Rafael, outside of San Francisco.
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Then in Seattle, doing odd jobs, I did landscaping again.
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And for a while we had a cleaning company, house cleaning, then house painting, all sorts of things.
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In the end we left the States in, I think, 1990.
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No, not true. 1991.
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And went back to …
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quickly to Germany.
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’90 … 1991, back to Germany. There I got a job as a continuity specialist and set curator for a movie company.
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We were doing crime dramas in Düsseldorf at the airport.
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How I got the job was very funny. My best friend, he was doing that for many years.
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He got a job offer and he said, ‚I can’t do it because I have another job lined up, but my best friend, he has time. He’ll do it.‘
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So, he pushed me into it.
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I went for a job interview and the guy said … asked me all sorts of questions.
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And then the manager said, ‚You’ve never done anything like this before. What makes you think that you can?‘
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I said, ‚Look, I can do anything that I want to do.‘
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I was super confident, but I wasn’t some kind of philosophical thing. But the guy, he felt that I meant
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that I meant business. If I want to do it, I will do it.
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And that got you the job?
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That got me the job. Like that.
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And then I did that for six months and they really wanted to keep me for the continuation of that.
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And I would have ended up doing lots of jobs in that field.
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It was great fun, but Chetna wanted to go and start her own school in Japan.
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And I thought, ‚Okay, let’s go to Japan, start the school. I will help her and then I will do my own thing.‘
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I wasn’t sure what that ‚own thing‘ was going to be.
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Good. That’s a good point to stop.
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Thank you to our sponsors! This video depicts a segment of a four-day interview with Frank Arjava Petter.
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For all videos and the list of sponsors visit our website:
www.reiki-conciliation.org
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Translation: AI
Transcript: René Vögtli
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