1:42
And during this time I didn’t really know what to do. And then it was evident at some point that Barbara Weber wanted to be recognized as the successor. And I believe that it was somewhere in the late summer or early fall, but again I don’t really know for sure, of 1981 that I went to visit Barbara Weber and asked her if we could do this together. And she said no.
2:22
There was another big question mark about a couple of master who had been initiated and I was surprised because it seemed like the had been initiated before my grandmother’s death which I was a little bit shocked about. But nobody would give me a straight answer. So I flew into Chicago to visit the Chicago masters and talked to them and I believe that I met everyone that year except for a woman named Iris Ishikuro, who was from San José and I never did get to visit her.
3:07
Eventually I realized that the masters had not been able to mourn their teacher of pay some kind of ceremony, you know do a ceremony about her, so I organized this meeting in Habi Hawaii in 1982 and I believe then it was in the spring, sometime like May or June. And this was the first time that a group of masters had come together and we stayed for a week together there. (0347) …(cough) (drinks)
4:01

4:01
some of the masters brought their spouses, some of them brought their adult children and we had a couple of little children I believe there too. And we had such a lovely time together that we decided to meet again the next year at Barbara Brown’s house.

04:28 ..(cough)….

I really do feel better (laughter, Andi in the background.) OK. Well, try my Ricola (RICOLA, René singing) I mean, the best thing Switzerland ever produced. (laughter, Thassos: except us, of course!) Yes! (René: dont forget we’re really Italians, Thassos) … (René: you know why Toblerone is called Toblerone?) … (actually the company is called Tobler and the first one for export, was Tobler One..) Is that really true? (René: well, the legend says so). OK, so… Try not to have a very strange protrusion of my mouth…. ähm
5:46
In this meeting in Hawaii we spent quite a lot of time talking about the succession and about Barbara Weber and her kind of threats to the rest of us. And we also spoke together about her way of teaching because when we started to exchange treatments, it was evident that we had different hand positions, we started in different places
6:23 (cough)..6:28
and a couple of the masters had, what I would call, special gifts that came up
0635-0640 (cough)..
and so their treatments looked quite different than the rest of us. So we spent some time having a demonstration. Ethel Lombardi, I believe, was a gifted healer herself and when she received Reiki this brought out this gift and the gift was, in her own words, to pull out energy out of the body and so that’s what her Reiki treatments looked like. So she kind of did a little class or something for us all and some people didn’t like it at all, some people could relate to it and some people thought “well that’s interesting but it’s not Reiki”.
7:31

0:00
Well, in 1982 when the masters, mostly the masters of Hawayo Takata met, in Hawaii, it was decided that I was the only one who would initiate masters. And I don’t know really where this decision came from, but it was a wise decision on the parts of other masters. Not because I was the best person to do it but because in tradition the Grand Master is the person to perpetuate the system. So they would be the only person to initiate masters. At the same time it meant that… the masters who came out of this system would get the same “training” or preparation and they would have something in common and hopefully that training would be… thorough and the best, you know, that somebody could offer….
1:24
Then.. and I felt honoured by this because I felt that all the masters knew that they could initiate a master and they were.. some of them were told before you die it’s important for you to initiate at least one master because then Reiki won’t die. And so…
1:53
I don’t think any of us realized what an amazing journey this would take us on. At one point I had certificates printed shortly after Hawaii and I got 1st degree, 2nd degree and I got master certificates done and I wanted to print 50 and the guy said “I’m not printing 50”, because it was the old kind of printing, where it was really a printing press. And he said: “forget it, you know, I’m gonna print you 2 or 300 and if you don’t use them, that’s fine but I can’t print 50”. And I thought “well, I’ll never use them”, of course I did….but not in the short time to 1988.
2:45

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

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

8:58
So at the end of the war Hawayo Takata was still teaching and practicing in Hawaii but like everywhere else, everywhere else on the planet Wolrd War II changed social habits enormously. Because this is one big factor in Hawaii, so there were all these young men who had been born on the plantations, were from the age of 18 to 30, they enlisted in the US Army the 442 battalion, which were only Japanese-American men, they were sent to Italy because of course they couldn’t be sent to the Far East theater because nobody would know who they were shooting at. And my father was one of these people, one of these men. And when they came back they all got the GI-Bill, so they were able to go to university, which in their lifetime they never would have been able to do. And they became doctors, lawyers, professors, you know scientists. I mean they just changed the face of Hawaii totally.
10:25
So in one generation they went from basically being slaves to running the state of Hawaii and to healing the people in the state of Hawaii through their professionalism. And this particular change, you know, was really interesting because my grandmother Hawayo Takata at the time she was, I don’t know, I mean how much money do you think she collected for Reiki treatment then, I have no idea, you know, a few Dollars. But some she’s a very frugal person, somehow she saved all her money, would buy a little plot of land, which is very Japanese, you know, land is it. So you buy a little plot of land and then you buy another little plot of land and pretty soon she moved to Honolulu in the 1950’s and was able to buy a piece of land on McCauley Avenue and it was on this land that the first condominium unit in Honolulu was built, amazing. For a Japanese woman who was born on a plantation to have done this through Reiki.
11:48

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

3:21
So whether Mikao … Chijuiro Hayashi was a dissonant or was a rebel in Mikao Usui’s day or whether he was his best student or simply a student that went off and founded a clinic, we’ll never know. But found a clinic he did, he met Hawayo Takata and …. in response to Reiki showing him that Hawayo Takata was his successor he also sat in contemplation with the other masters that were in his circle and did something very unique at that time for him by giving the succession and following the energy of Reiki, which led Reiki out of Japan and into Hawaii and then into the rest of the world.
4:27