Kohrogi-san: Healer and Musician

Madhuri meets a special man in Tokyo

In about 1991, when I was working in both Healing Arts and the Mystery School, I was involved in an ongoing Colourpuncture training with a group of healers. One of them, Champaka, brought from Japan a quiet, dignified man, rather older than we were, to introduce to us a healing method called Ito-Thermie. This is a sort of heat treatment employing burning incense in metal holders rubbed over the skin. The incense is specially formulated from loquat leaves and other botanicals; it produces a pleasant-smelling smoke, deeply relaxing, detoxing, good-feeling (the Japanese word for “It feels so good!” is kimochiiiii.)

I enjoyed all this, but didn’t think much more about it then.

Later, in the mid-90’s, Danish Leena and I spent four autumns working at Bharti’s Synergy centre in Kichijoji, an upmarket area of Tokyo. The commute from our dark little apartment building was complicated and lengthy, the hours were strange and long, the breaks non-existent, the lunches shovelled in standing; clients had travelled long distances across that behemoth city for their sessions and they wanted 2-hour ones.

There is an ethos in Japan that working yourself to death is virtuous and good; guest workers are not spared either. So the clients tended to be exhausted, sleep-deprived, repressed, and working in jobs they didn’t love; Leena and I struggled to make contact, struggled to survive our own exhaustion. (That first trip, my joy and relief when my 8-week stint was finally done were so very great… and my wretched prostrated state was so acute that when I was in the bus to the airport, and went to the rigorously-clean toilet in the back, and saw a red plaque on the wall with a push-button in it and the words, CALL BUZZAR; I took a pen out of my bag and scratched in a “D” at the end.)

What kept us alive were three things: faxes from our boyfriends (not always fun though since those fellows sometimes confessed their extra-curricular dates in them); hot baths after work in our tiny deep tub where you sat with your knees under your chin feeling like in a prehistoric burial, while the chemical-scented water reached your shoulders and the very-nearby toilet breathed eau-de-deep-sewage right at you – for we lived in a slum, and the plumbing was arteried through the whole building. (I was sometimes so desperately tired and hungry both that I ate my hastily-cooked bok choy and tofu sitting in this tub.) So that’s two things.

The third was the infrequent and courageous jaunts we took by bus and train to some different part of the megalopolis, where we’d skirt veggie shops and video shops and duck under the ubiquitous electrical wires, to dart down a narrow lane lined with leaning, cereal-box buildings (all of Tokyo is, quite normally, riding seismic wobbles daily, and houses are not built to last)… to one that looks just like the rest.

Champaka would meet us there, and we’d be ushered in to a yummily thermie-smelling treatment room, where the same dignified man with large foldy-lidded eyes, and with a still, tangible glow about him, and a face as fluid and expressive as any mime’s, but effortless and much more beautiful; awaited us.

We’d each get a session; first sharing our issues and asking whatever question we might have; Champaka translating; then lying on the sheet on the narrow table and having our treatment… delicious, deep, magical, penetrating, and different every time, even though the movements of the two hot little instruments might be much the same.

Then Mr Kohrogi would say something – usually just one clipped sentence – in response to the question we’d asked. We always came away restored, rested, transformed, with something to chew on and consider…

Once he said to me, “You are only to play, from morning till night.” Another time he said, “If you go on working like this, your body will be destroyed, and you could even die.”

The world is secretly full, I suspect, of back streets with remarkable people toiling away in them, in well-used, botanical-redolent rooms: healers, shamans, medicine-women, masseurs, tarot-readers, rebalancers, oddballs who scratch amber belt buckles whilst waving a finger before your body to sense out what ails you. (I can never forget a shiatsu man I saw in Tokyo, who worked in a narrow hallway at the back of his miniature house, and took my body apart like it was a chicken being separated for cooking, while I screamed and roared; and later I went out on the street and half of me was walking on one narrow pavement and the other half on the other, across the street; and I hung my ears from lamp-posts and did cartwheels in the astral, so relieved was I of the knitting tensions that had strung me tight. So relieved, in fact, of necessary ligaments and joints altogether.) And all these things are wonderful.

But sometimes one of these blessed oddballs will stick to you, despite your best efforts to ignore their warnings and pronouncements – those same pronouncements you’d begged for, and paid for (in Mr Kohrogi’s case just a pittance, really – ). I have been told so many things by truly wise beings, starting of course with Osho (well, really starting as far back as 1965, when I was 13 and was taken to a Zen master in Los Angeles). I have generally taken about thirty years to hear those things at all.

And so I went right on working like that, and my body nearly did die; and only when I was recovering from brain surgery in 2003 in Poona did I remember what Mr Kohrogi had told me, in 2000, in France (for my sister and my mother loved him, and we all kept somehow meeting) that I had a brain tumour, small, not cancer; but it needed seeing to – and I’d forgotten – did I look again at Mr Kohrogi, and my inner jaw dropped in awe, and I woke up, and thought, “I’d better listen to this guy.”

…And I still didn’t know he was a rock’n’roll wallah.

Since then I’ve sat in Glasgow, tromped through rain in the Highlands, sat again in Kyoto in a Zen temple, and danced madly in Provence, with this warm, genial, smoke-wreathed, whiskey-loving, sanpaku-eyed, sharp-as-ten-rapiers guy… drunk wine, had fish‘n’chips, and, in the group, been gazed at in the eyes till I felt the love pulled up out of my toes, heady as a blast of sweetest-roses-in-astonishment, to come out my own eyes back at him.

I’ve hugged him goodbye at airports and in train stations, and known that same “there is nobody there – there is sky, there is allotted Emptiness, bird-shaped, or heart-shaped, but Contentless,” that stops the Me short, and makes it stare at itself in confusion. That empty sky we’ve heard about, and still don’t understand.

And so I would like to introduce the Rock’n’Roll Isness: for Kohrogi-san plays a mean guitar, and was in a rock band before he became a healer; and how he loves to rock ‘n’ roll! He sings duet with Takamu, a young man shaped like a smoky pipe-cleaner, who is the son of Kohrogi-san’s best friend. Takamu was given Ito-Thermie the moment he was born, and his birth had been eased by Ito-Thermie being given to his mother. He wears cartoonish t-shirts and funny trousers and jackets that look somehow exactly right on him. He loves 50’s songs, and plays and sings to himself in all the breaks of Mr Kohrogi’s Natsukashi meditation retreats: Natsukashi just means, Original Face.

Mr Kohrogi’s rock‘n’roll is an enthusiastic shouting-out of his poetry; for his songs are poems, in the lively, evocative tradition of Hafiz or Rumi. He looks wonderful in white jeans and t-shirt, jumping and strumming, and making the space for us to jump and shout. (Aren’t we all just waiting for more chances to jump and shout? Isn’t that what Osho gives us in abundance on this earth: “For god’s sake,” he glows and twinkles at us, summoning us up with his suddenly long, long arms: “Jump and shout!”) In strange cities Mr Kohrogi will take his guitar out into the streets at lunchtime and busk, and return grinning with amusement that people actually put coins in his guitar case!