Former Monterey pastor connects mind, body, spirit through tai chi
Hei Takarabe, left, master trainer of tai chi, works on a move translated as “moving your hand in clouds” with Phil Sakakihara while leading a class at Oldemeyer Center in Seaside on Thursday. (David Royal - Monterey Herald)
By Dennis Taylor, Monterey Herald
Posted: 07/02/15, 5:46 PM PDT | Updated: 1 day ago
Hei Takarabe, master trainer of tai chi, leads a class at Oldemeyer Center in Seaside on Thursday. (David Royal - Monterey Herald)
SEASIDE >> As a young immigrant from Japan, Hei Takarabe originally had aspirations to become a healer — possibly a medical missionary — a path he pursued during his college years at Pasadena City College, then at UCLA, where he majored in chemistry as a pre-med student.
He became a spiritual healer instead, serving 38 years as a minister, including 21 as pastor of Monterey’s El Estero Presbyterian Church. Along the way, he discovered tai chi, a Chinese martial art developed by Taoists, who believe we are all part of a universal life force — an energy (chi) that can be harnessed for health.
Takarabe, never a “morning person,” rises these days at 4:30 a.m., meditates for 30 minutes, then heads to a local health club to practice tai chi for 90 minutes. Tuesdays and Thursdays, he teaches the art form at the Oldemeyer Center in Seaside.
“Tai chi works on your energy, so you relax your body, and your mind and body connection is established,” he explains. “You move your hands very slowly and allow your mind to get into your body. Once you get connected, the mind goes to where it needs to be energized and heal.”
Much of Takarabe’s adult life has been a quest to understand people and the meaning of life. His earliest years were spent in uncertainty in post-World War II Manchuria, where his father, who worked for the puppet government, was devoted to helping peasant farmers.
When the war ended, his family became refugees, at the mercy, he said, of Russian soldiers and Chinese gangsters, moving with help from the United Nations from Manchuria to Japan, where life was difficult.
“I was 7 then and didn’t understand much of the oppression. The hunger and suffering came when we got to Japan,” he remembers.
“We settled in Kagoshima, where my grandmother was, and had some money, but there was nothing in the city to buy, unless it was too expensive,” Takarabe says. “So, my mother and I would take the earliest train into the countryside and knock on the doors of the farmers, asking them to sell us some vegetables, or anything else they had to eat. What we were doing was illegal, but the police wouldn’t arrest us, because they would have had to arrest almost everybody.”
The first-grade education he had received in Manchuria was of no use — most school days there had been spent drilling on how to run to the underground shelter, he says — so he was catching up in Japanese schools until he was a fourth-grader.
By high school, he was attending a Presbyterian church in Japan, where he met missionaries who sparked his interest in coming to America.
A year after his graduation, his family found sponsorship in Pasadena, and Takarabe began his college years and worked as a houseboy for $35 a month.
“I had studied English for seven years, but discovered when I got to the United States that what I had learned was almost totally useless,” he says. “I could read, but not very well. I had difficulty understanding people in my classes. I was learning from the ground up.”
The strategy he adopted to accelerate his English education was to shut the Japanese language out of his life for four years.
By that time he was achieving mostly A’s as a chemistry student at UCLA, earning a degree and applying for medical school. But he changed direction after he became interested in attending a Presbyterian seminary.
“I enjoyed seminary because they taught psychology, history and theology,” he says. “It gave me time to really think about why I am here, and what is the purpose of life.”
Takarabe spent two summers as an intern, preaching at a church in the small California town of Strathmore, where he met and married Gloria Ishida, a farmer’s daughter who had become a registered nurse.
After graduating seminary and becoming ordained, he was invited to pastor Parkview Presbyterian Church in Sacramento, where he spent 17 years ministering to a congregation of mostly Japanese-Americans. He preached his sermons in both Japanese and English.
To better understand his flock, Takarabe began to interview his parishioners about their lives and philosophies, creating an oral history that would become part of the archives at CSU Sacramento.
“That really taught me a lot about their lives, their hardships,” he says. “It was best for me because I regained so much respect for them and their struggles. We interviewed, we translated, and we edited it in such a way that it was understandable to people who never had any background or understanding of the history of Japanese-Americans.”
Hei and Gloria relocated with their two children to Monterey in 1982, when he was invited to become pastor of El Estero Presbyterian, a pulpit he held until he retired in 2003 at age 65.
“We came back here and saw that huge, awesome body of water again, and it was fantastic. We went to watch the sunset almost every night,” he says. “And we’d have guests who would visit us from Sacramento, and we loved to take them to see the sunset.”
Takarabe’s first exposure to tai chi came as he observed a friend performing the art during a Presbyterian retreat at Asilomar in 1985.
After 10 years of practicing on his own, he sought out a master teacher, Dr. Paul Lam, paying $650 for a six-day workshop at Asilomar that, he says, changed his life.
“It was one of the best things I could have done for myself,” says Takarabe, who then found Dr. Stephanie Taylor, a Carmel physician who became his mentor in the art. He’s been training with her locally, and helping with her classes, ever since.
Takarabe, a grandfather, feels more at peace with his world today than ever before.