0:00
ähm.. 0007 It took a few years for me to understand that my mother had been with my grandmother during the time that she met Chujiro Hayashi and began to practice Reiki. And what I understood from her was that she had been initiated in 1st degree with Chujiro Hayashi. And then that was it. She didn’t do 2nd degree. And for most of the time in our relationship from 1980 when I became… understanding about being a Reiki master, she was not happy with the way that Reiki was being taught, that it had been changed through the culture and that we didn’t respect it.
1:08
It was a kind… it was something like.. in polite society you don’t talk about religion, politics and then I had to add Reiki, because her political ideas were very different than mine, so we never talked about politics and we didn’t talk about Reiki because in the end, you know, when I got older and more mature in my Reiki understanding… for her, Reiki was something private, it was not a series of phenomenas, it was… it was something that was practiced without.. being surprised in some by how it worked.
2:09
What she saw in the students of my grandmother and me included, 0216 was that we.. we shared a lot, we shared a lot about… (repositioning herself)
2:32
Cluster: Takata
2:33
We shared a lot about what we were doing with each other and that wasn’t something that she liked, that we were constantly trying to figure out the psychology of what was happening, that we were always astonished that it worked… things like this. So for her this was kind of sacroligious, anti-Reiki so to speak.
3:04
As she grew older, she grew very possessive of her mother because… I feel that she understood my grandmother’s passion for Reiki and that is was sort of her destiny to be this person in Reiki and at the same time, I don’t know if my gandmother would have been a different kind of mother, but as a mother she was… well, they didn’t have an easy relationship. So it was an interesting process to see them, those two and then me, because the three of us felt like if I backed up as an observer, felt like we were the three women in the household sometimes and everybody else faded into the background. And that was interesting and a lot of it had to do with……I feel that a lot of it had to do with my mother’s perception how Reiki should be practiced.
4:30
4:30
So in the end when I had cancer and I started… and I was living in the same town as her, I was receiving hands-on-Reiki like from 7 to 5 times a week, almost every day, not from my mother but from friends of mine and people would come in and stay for a couple of weeks and treat me and so on. So, she would never let me treat her but she offered to treat me a couple of times and that was very special…
5:11
She said that she wanted to be a mother and that she didn’t want to take Reiki on as a career, so to speak. And I used to think that this was a kind of sacrifice, but I realized it was a choice of hers and that she made that consciously and I appreciated that.
5:39
Now that she had passed, I feel much freer in what I can do in the public and what is… what I can open up to the public because I feel that I have… I have taken on some of her understanding of what’s private with my grandmother, the line between grandmother as a private grandmother and Hawayo Takata as the Reiki master.
6:15
One of the things that has been exciting for me in … now I go back to the archives and what I’ve said about going through my grandmother’s things, my mother actually gave me in 1980…something when my grandmother … after my grandmother died… that they will be, I hope, will be housed in the Japanese-American-National Museum in Los Angeles because it… she will be held as a whole person, not just a Reiki person, but as a Japanese-American woman who did this amazing thing and dedicated her life and has touched the lives of people all over the world. So for me that’s an amazing story.
7:07
ein wichtiger Satz, der zeigt wie eingeengt sich Phyllis bis zum Tode ihrer Mutter gefühlt hat.
0:00
Many people ask about the reason why Chujiro Hayashi didn’t accept Hawayo Takata as a student in the beginning. And there are some rumours that is was because she was a woman, which I have never actually thought about because
0031/0032 (räusper)
the person who took her to the clinic in the first place was a woman who was a student of Chujiro Hayashi. She was the dietician in the hospital where Hawayo Takata was going to have an operation….
0048-0:56 (räusper, Augenverdreher) So, äh..
I actually have this question and it was kind of unanswered for a few years and then there was some understanding that came to me that in Japan…. during this time there was a lot of confusion and some of that confusion was about nationalistic ideas of Japan’s culture being exported to other countries and in the same way other countries’ cultures being imported into Japan, which was not actually welcomed because for the most part the Japanese considered everyone else on the planet barbarians. One of the things is that of course who they saw in the beginning were sailors and they never bathed and the Japanese bathed almost every day. So just that little physical difference was one thing.
2:04
2. Cluster: Cultural Transfer
reconciliation west/Japan
Cannon MVI 5146 and MVI5147
2:04
The other thing is that the sailors of course being who they were, sailors, and kind of pirates, you know, were not very sensitive to walking on Tatami mat floors with their muddy boots and so on. And the Japanese were like very refined, very sensitive to new ones and the sailors new ones was like “Get me another drink” you know. So they had these very strong ideas about what the rest of the world was like.
2:38
So they didn’t want their refined culture … represented by flower arrangement, tea ceremony, martial arts and those kind of things, they didn’t want them to be taken out into the barbarian world and destroyed, basically. So when I found this out I thought “well maybe that was one of the reasons why he refused her”, I don’t know. Even though she spoke Japanese as her first language, she was fully Japanese in parentage but she was born in Hawaii and was going to go back to Hawaii, that was very clear.
2:24
5:38
And then she did other, she studied other things. So I don’t know how long she went somewhere… but she came back on an appointed day and Chujiro Hayashi kind of made a speech, a farewell speech to his students about what his predictions were, about Japan attacking the US and how they would be in war and what, you know, Hawayo Takata could do to save her family and herself and so on. And also he recognized Hawayo Takata as his successor by giving her all of his worldly possessions, that’s a very usual thing to do in Japan for succession. And then he laid down and in a little while stopped breathing and went into transition. This is what Hawayo Takata would say in her story.
6:46
I won’t get into this but I believe that this… she said that this was the most … spiritual moment of my life. And when she said that you just had this feeling of this man, knowing that this was his time to die and knowing that he could actually choose it and that he did it. And I don’t believe it was through a suicide. Maybe some historian researcher will tell me otherwise but even so he still chose this moment. And in Japan that’s a very honourable death.
7:35
7:35
So then Hawayo Takata eventually went back to Hawaii and during the war many of the people in Hawaii were put into internment camp or (0745) they were contained in their plantation … (räusper), exuse me. (0754) They were contained in the plantation housing areas. So Hawayo Takata somehow and it is said that she followed Chujiro Hayashi’s instructions, she was able to travel from island to island freely. And she gave Reiki treatments, she taught Reiki, she did a lot of things but that was very, very unusual for a Japanese person, either man or woman, to be able to leave their island of residence and travel freely, that was unheard of. Her family never were put into internment camps and my mother tells stories of taking cookies and treats to her friends who were in the camps. So there were camps in Hawaii. And this some people don’t believe and some people say it didn’t happen but I believe my mother. (laughs) (0856) (räusper)
8:58
11:48
I find that this juxtaposition, you know, of here Chujiro Hayashi didn’t really want to teach her Reiki because she was, you know, going to take it to Hawaii and then it ended up that he named her his successor, knowing full well that this would take Reiki out of Japan and perhaps save it in some way. And this for me is a very good example of a Japanese person not worrying about what the social norm was, or what would put him into prison or what was the best for himself. No, he followed the energy of Reiki and said “this is your successor and so it goes out and whatever happens to Reiki will happen”. And actually what happened to Reiki fulfilled Mikao Usui’s dream that Reiki would touch the world.
1301-1302 (lets her hands drop)
13:00