Was Reiki Even Japanese?

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Was Reiki Even Japanese?

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‚This is too logical. We Japanese don’t think logically.‘ (Chetna)

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Alright, we are in the year 1992, and actually something interesting happened in 1992.

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Japan’s Emperor Akihito visited Beijing.

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A hugely significant step to improve the Sino-Japanese relationships.

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More than reconciling Japan’s war crimes in China, Manchuria and the abuse of comfort women in Korea,

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China was secretly hoping that the Emperor’s visit improves China’s diplomatic isolation and sanctions,

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which they endured over the Tiananmen massacre earlier on.

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Also in 1992, in the USA, the Rodney King incident happened.

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So it’s a significant year in history in many ways, and you described us that you learned from Raj in Berlin.

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You’re flying back, you’ve taught already, Chetna, your wife, Reiki 1, but you were already full of certain question marks.

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We had doubts. Doubts were not only because …. In 1992 I already had been with Chetna for four years.

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So when I learned Reiki, I’d already been with her for four years.

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But if we go further back to that occurrence in Germany when I was whatever, 15, 16, I saw this beautiful Japanese girl.

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I’ve always had this infatuation, you could almost say, with Japanese people.

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And when I went to Poona in 1980, very soon I had a stream of Japanese girlfriends.

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So I was 20 at the time.

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So already from age 20, I started to be around Japanese people, started to understand a little bit the language, started to understand the culture,

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started to understand the Japanese viewpoint of spirituality because in Poona that’s all that we looked at, was that.

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And having the Japanese girlfriends, I got a good look into that and when I learned Reiki, it didn’t fit that understanding that I had at the time.

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Now, having lived in Japan already from ’89, so for three years, it got worse.

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I thought something is wrong, something doesn’t fit here.

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To the point when we thought that Reki really was created outside by a non-Japanese person.

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And that that outsider gave it a Japanese fake name, that sort of…

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That’s what we thought because before I went to Germany, we asked all the people we knew from the Osho community,

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all the friends of Chetna, her family, her parents. Everybody we ran into basically, we asked them, ‚Do you know anything about Reki?‘

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Most people said, ‚Reiki, no, you mean the ‚Reiki of the universe‘?’… Which is ‚Reiki of the universe‘ …

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The way the Japanese people – if they understand it in a good context – would understand it like that:

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It means the energy that makes that … enlivens everything. It gives life to everything.

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Lay (jap. pronunciation for Rei) is spirit, Ki is energy.

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And they said, ‚No, we don’t know.‘ Never heard that before and those who did they said, ‚Ah, you mean that American thing?‘

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We we’re going like that … Can’t be!

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So I learned the history from my brother and I thought,

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‚What a bunch of fairy tales is that, it can’t be true. It just can’t be true. It’s too…‘

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Usui sensei being a Christian principle of a school … can’t be true.

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And so on. And all the stories.

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So I had my doubts. Basically, I started to research not because I wanted to write a book to become famous,

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not because I wanted to make a movement, make a change, become this or that, nothing at all, zero, nothing, no implication,

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no aim whatsoever in this direction. It was just the doubts that were sitting on my chest, going like,

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‚I like the Reiki practice, but the way it’s done …‘

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And you were teaching it now?

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After … So, Chetna was my first student and then afterwards I started to teach but I was really uncomfortable …

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teaching something that I haven’t got really in my heart.

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But it’s an important situation, because you were the first really person to popularize Reiki in Japan.

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Of course, there was a original organization, the Gakkai, which existed, but it was not present in the perception of people.

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Most people who … The remnants of Reiki from earlier times was home remedy in the families, wasn’t it? But as a teacher,

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you were the first, not the first entirely, but the first Westerner in Japan teaching Reiki in Japan. Is that a correct summary?

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No.

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Correct me.

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After a while, I found out that in 1984, almost ten years earlier,

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there had been a teacher of the Radiance Technique, Mrs Mitsui, Mieko Mitsui.

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She was one of the teachers of Barbara … working in Barbara Ray’s Radiance Technique.

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She…

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A Japanese lady coming from America, I believe.

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I don’t know if she was first or second generation Japanese, I don’t know. Anyway, it doesn’t matter.

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So, she went to Japan to teach Reiki and she taught only Reiki 1 and Reiki 2 in Tokyo, and I think in Osaka also.

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And …

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People who wanted to learn more – she came for maybe 2 years or 3 years –

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people who wanted to learn more were told that they needed a university degree, if they wanted to become a teacher.

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They needed to speak English. They had to pay $10,000. At the time was a lot of money in the 80s.

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And they had to travel to New York to do the training.

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All these things were impossible. Most people didn’t speak English, maybe 99% didn’t speak English.

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Then they had to have the degree, then to have the money, then to travel to the States, but that was too much. So nobody did.

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And they were waiting for 9 years for somebody to appear to teach teachers in the country.

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And that happened to be me, so I was not the first.

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The bed was made, but I didn’t know.

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Yeah, you weren’t the first to teach Reiki, fair enough.

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You were the first Westerner and then also you started to teach the third degree …

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There I was the first. There was somebody else, somebody called Steven Gousselvier or something.

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I don’t know, I never met him, I never heard from him again.

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He was also teaching Reiki a little bit after me in Japan, but I don’t know, I just saw his advertisements.

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I never met him, I don’t know what happened to him.

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So we started to teach, and as I said, my first student was my former wife.

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When we did the master initiation, and I taught her how to initiate others, she said,

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‚This is too logical. We don’t think logically. This was made by a Westerner, I swear!

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I am sure, because we don’t think like that. It’s so structured, it’s so…‘

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Japanese people, they think in wonderful quantum jumps. All of a sudden, you think … ‚How did we get here?‘

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I love it, but it’s really not logical. It’s totally…

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No words, I don’t have words. So, Chetna said, ‚It can’t be.‘

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So we had this doubt. And out of this doubt we started to research more and more and more,

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and then people didn’t know about Reiki, or they said, ‚Oh, it’s this American thing‘, that at some point I just thought,

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‚It’s all … The whole thing, it’s just fabricated, it doesn’t exist.‘

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And Usui sensei is a person who probably doesn’t exist.‘

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Sorry (gassho).

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I thought that.

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Then I kind of gave up, but I liked the teaching, I liked the practice, so there were a few personal friends of ours who said ‚Hey …

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did you go to Germany to do Reiki? Was it nice? We’d like to learn.‘

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So that was the first group of people in ’93, in I think April or something, I taught.

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A bunch of Japanese friends. I liked the teaching.

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I enjoyed it, but because I didn’t feel comfortable with the history, I left that part out. I said,

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‚Okay, look, the history sounds like fairy tales to me. They say that Usui sensei was this and that,

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but I don’t think so, but I let you know when I find more.‘ That’s when we really started to look.

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When I was listening to you I thought, well, the history part in my Reiki seminar – still today, I don’t spend much time on it, even today,

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because, frankly … Of course people want to know and that’s correct.

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And I think they have a justified demand that I as a Reiki teacher have a fair understanding of the history,

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but for the practice of Reiki, it’s not that terribly relevant to know the history.

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Even for me today, and I can well … understand and sympathize with you back then,

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leaving the history part a little nebulous, a little untouched.

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Yes, so I did it like that. Of course now I spend a lot of time talking about history,

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because my whole life is intertwined with all the historical research of more than 30 years.

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That’s what we will come to. That, of course, has been a turning point in your particular life,

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because here you are, early 90s, full of doubts, full of questions, you’re teaching.

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You have to blend out the history aspect because you sense that can’t be everything,

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and that eventually drove you to doing a lot of research, which ended with … or which started really

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with the publication of a very important book in 1997.

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In a way, I have the impression, please correct me …

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So, you’re now in the early 90s, and in a way you were the beneficiary of a situation,

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which that teacher you mentioned, Mrs. Mitsui, created,

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that you have all these Reiki Alliance people waiting to continue in Japan, these are Japanese people,

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and here you are now, and you’re coming back from Berlin, you’re teaching what you learned …

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How long did this go on? And how was your seminar this time, because later – I don’t know when chronologically exactly –

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there were some questions of Raj’s way, how he got into Reiki?

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That will be of course an important part, I’m not sure whether we have enough time before lunch to cover that,

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but I’d like you to shed light on that. In the meantime, before lunch, tell us a little bit about you having this many people –

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how many people did you initiate, how many students, all these, how many masters who were waiting basically from the Mitsui legacy?

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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