Introduction
On 11 and 12 October 2024 I went to Yatsugatake, the mountain area spanning Nagano and Yamanashi, for the Real Fantasy Retreat Advance, two days led by Hitoshi Hibiki. I have written elsewhere about the retreat itself; here I want to describe the Rolfing demonstration I gave there.
How I Came to Be There
Some background, for readers outside Japan.
Hitoshi Hibiki keeps a magic and shot bar called HIVIKI in Hiroshima, and it is there that he performs. He calls his show Real Fantasy. Rather than presenting tricks, he works from his own account of what he has experienced, and asks the audience to set aside the question of how and simply be in it.
I came across him through a book. In February 2024 I went to a shop in Tokyo called Mitsurudō for a talk by Fumito Takekura on his book Dogū o Yomu, and a book Mr Hibiki had written with two co-authors was sitting there. I ordered it, read it, and decided I wanted to see the show. In July that year I was travelling around the Seto Inland Sea, and on 29 July I went to the bar in Hiroshima.
The retreat came from the same evening at Mitsurudō. Yuko Hosoe, who edited Mu magazine for many years and who I met there — the same person who later arranged the interview about me in Mu — asked whether I would like to come to the Real Fantasy Retreat Advance. It was open to people who had seen the show. I said yes without hesitating.
It was held at a place called NORTH VILLAGE, in the village of Hara in Yatsugatake, and organised by Noriko Kanzaki.
The Demonstration
As it happened, Mr Hibiki had read the piece about me in Mu and had become curious about Rolfing. Toward the end of the retreat he was giving each of the ten participants a session with an enormous tuning fork he had brought with him, and just before that, with the help of one of the participants, Hironari Nemoto, a voice actor and narrator, I was given the chance to offer him a Rolfing session of five minutes.
He told me that he had been unwell in the run-up to the retreat, and that two months earlier he had fallen and struck his right shoulder hard. Since then the front right side of his neck had narrowed, and his right shoulder and shoulder blade hurt constantly.
Watching him during the show, I had seen that his pelvis sat unevenly from left to right, and I thought that if the spine could be settled it might help. So at the start of the session I decided to place a hand at the line between the lumbar spine and the sacrum, and then to wait.
What surprised me was the sense of the thoracic spine, then the cervical spine, coming up in turn. As he put it, “My neck is going kyūn, kyūn” — the sound is one you would use in Japanese for something tightening and releasing quickly. His neck began to move of its own accord, and a body that had been catching somewhere seemed to start moving gladly.
At the end I said that the body has its own power to heal, and to trust that, and to let the neck find where it settles below the heart. Then the session was over. Afterwards, as the Facebook posts below show, he seemed easier, and I was relieved. After all, unless the person themselves wants to get better, the body does not begin to move.
Conclusion
This piece has been about the demonstration session I gave Hitoshi Hibiki. My thanks to Mr Nemoto for making the opportunity, and to Mr Hibiki for agreeing to it.
Note, September 2026
What I did that day was place a hand at the line between the lumbar spine and the sacrum, and wait. Five minutes. That was all of it.
In the ten-session series there is an order — which session takes up which part. That day there was no order and nothing else besides. I looked at the body, put a hand where I thought it belonged, and added nothing further.
And the thoracic spine, then the cervical spine, came up in turn. I had not moved them.
In 2025, during the advanced Rolfing training, I was given a word for this state. Neutral.
When I wrote this piece I did not have the word. I had been doing it without it. At the time I thought I had skipped the sequence because there were only five minutes. Reading it back now, that was not what happened.
At the end I said that the body has its own power to heal, and to trust that. I think the reason it came out as trust is that I had not done anything.
One other thing, looking back. In the piece I wrote that Mr Hibiki had read the article in Mu and become curious about Rolfing, as though that were where it started. It was not. Both of us had come from the same room — an evening at Mitsurudō in February 2024, a talk about clay figurines. The interview came out of that evening. So did the invitation to the retreat. I had already been to his bar in Hiroshima by then.
Five minutes with a hand on someone’s back, eight months after walking into a shop to hear about the Jōmon period.