You Have to Choose Your Clinic or Me!

Akihiko & Liane

“We met at an Eastern medicine clinic in Tokyo called Akahigedo where he was my shiatsu therapist,” says Liane, a Canadian American who first came to Japan in 1985 as a writer and arts administration graduate student as she recalls how she met her husband Akihiko. “I was stressed out and starting to lose my sense of purpose for being here when I visited Akahigedo,” Liane recalls.

WAKABAYASHI Akihiko was working at the clinic and to Liane he seemed to be an evolutionary stage apart. “I felt I’d met my partner in this guy Aki who followed a Taoist master and who had to face all sorts of rites and challenges each day. Particularly grueling was his 7-day-a-week work schedule that I had to either accept or reject as terms for being with him,” she says.

“We had talked a bit while he was treating me at the clinic,” Liane says. “But I knew nothing about him except he had a great easy-going laugh.” After she stopped going for treatments, Aki called her out of the blue and asked, “Hey, you’re a journalist. Want to come to something interesting?” It was his grandmother’s funeral and his first date request from him.

After the relationship had developed, the couple hit a major snag. The couple married in 1991 with plans for a family but children were long in coming. “I couldn’t conceive for 6 years and this became a long-standing theme of conversation, reflection, tears, stress,” Liane says. “But the thing that changed my life came totally unplanned–at Aki’s “consciousness training” workshop.”

“He introduced art. He had us draw. Aki asked us to draw something we wanted and really visualize it in a picture. So I drew myself nude and pregnant. I was stunned to see myself this way.” Over the next few months, Liane started drawing more with pastels, drawing more and more pictures of her wish for pregnant self, and “Lo and behold I became pregnant without any other intervention.”

Around the time of Liane’s pregnancy, the couple was struggling with their future. “Aki’s work schedule was impossible as a long-term life option, but I put up with it for 7 years because the training at Akahigedo is rich in compassion and skill,” she says. “Finally in 1996, I told him that he had to choose his clinic or me. At first he chose the clinic so I told him to go home to his parents and live with them for a while until he was sure that was what he wanted to do.”

The couple lived apart for two months before they visited a psychotherapist and in that one visit, their lives were turned around. “The psychotherapist made Aki realize that the ultimate test of being a good Taoist disciple was to be strong enough to graduate. Aki right there gave notice to his master that he would graduate. Looking back, it was the one decision that allowed our marriage to move forward,” Liane recalls.

“We are both perfectionists,” Liane says about their common characteristics. “To be one is highly annoying; to live with one can be downright interesting.”