In May 2019 Bishop Gene Savoy Jr. and Reno Community members Noriko and Robert Roy traveled to Japan to visit members of the staff at the Community Center in Kurume, Fukuoka and Bishop Yukinori Matsushita at his Tokyo office. In September a follow-up training seminar was held at the Center in Reno, Nevada. The seminar grew from being for Japan Community members only to a global training seminar. This interview tells how it happened.
Communique Editor: What prompted the May trip to Japan initially? Why did you go at this time?
Gene: Well, the regular schedule is to go every two years. A small group from Reno generally goes every other May. This trip was already planned. Yuki and I talked about it while he was here in Reno during the 2018 Convocation. It was just time for me to go again.
Communique Editor: What was different about the trip this year compared to previous years?
Gene: Well, Noriko, as our intermediary between us here in the United States and the Community in Japan, started finding out there were some organizational problems people were having in Japan, and it was based on her concern that the trip turned into something like a reorganizing visit to delve into what their procedures were. And for me to help with this, it was necessary for me to meet with each member of the core group individually, one on one, to get a better understanding of who they are and what their talents are.
Communique Editor: What became the real purpose of the trip? What was the theme of the presentations you delivered?
Gene: Well, the trip followed a scheduled agenda during the first week when we were at the Center in Kurume, Fukuoka. The main two components, basically, were, first, my one-on-one interviews with every single one of the core group (Keiko Inoue, Eriko Ueno, Shoko Ohba, Yaeno Sanada, Miyuki Okayama, Koshu Kawahara) plus a select number of other people (Junko Yamamori, Yukako Kawaii, and Hiroko Soejima). Then, second, was the workshop, which was going through all of the materials that I took with me that dealt with the inquiry and enrollment process. And we had a General conversation about precepting. The final thing was another set of private meetings with the group in Tokyo.
Communique Editor: Because you did these presentations, and all of this extensive activity, how did that affect the attendance for our convocation in September?
Gene: Oh, I think it increased the number of people coming because of the promise of an operations seminar. The trip to Japan was phase one. Phase two was the training, the actual training, in September, and then, possibly, a followup trip sometime within the next six months after September. So it may be that some of us will be going back again in the Spring.
Communique Editor: What was the focus of the seminar?
Gene: Having a seminar to actually train people to do what we do here at the Center in Reno is, I think, very significant. We have never before authorized preceptors outside of the Reno Center. We’ve got recorded, on video and in transcripts, all of the components from handling inquiries to precepting students. So we now have a template of how we do these things.
Communique Editor: And so what are the expectations after the training that will be given during the Convocation this year?
Gene: That the staff at the Center in Kurume will basically run Cosolargy International in Japan the way we run things here in Reno, the way we use our systems and procedures, for the most part. It also became very clear that because they do no precepting, they lose a lot of students at a pretty rapid rate. That affects finances, which means that they struggle, and the core people are putting extra money in to keep things afloat.
Communique Editor: Any other developments you are looking forward to?
Gene: The September training seminar during Convocation was originally planned to be just for our Japanese staff members. But we had Paul Young from Australia, and Humberto Garcia from Mexico, and Shawn Smith from Africa who took part in the seminar. They will each be acting as some of our representatives around the world. So it has really become a much grander concept, I think. Truly international. This operations seminar is a new thing. We have never done this before, and it grew out of the trip to Japan, and has now expanded into something different again. It could be the beginning of future training seminars.
Communique Editor: That sounds great. Has anything like this ever been done before?
Gene: The training seminar was the first of its kind in our history. It originated with the trip to Japan. It was going to be just for Japanese, but the idea for the Convocation, in my mind, just expanded. This is the largest convocation we have had, I would say, in a couple of decades. So the training seminar grew from just focusing on the community in Japan to include also Mexico, Australia, and Africa.
Communique Editor: Who took part in the training seminar?
Gene: We have had an established center in Japan for ten years, and that is where the majority of the attendees came from. We are also preparing to create a center that will be in Mexico in the near future. And so we also had in attendance Humberto Garcia, a recently retired professor of physics who has been translating the Academy materials into Spanish over the past couple of years. He hopes to relocate there to our property in Southern Baja within the year. The idea is eventually to have him living on the property in Baja. We did something very similar when we acquired the Sanctuary property. We’ve bought all of this property, and now we have to assign somebody to be there to put down roots. Paul Young is now our official representative of Cosolargy in Australia. And he too was present for training. So was Shawn Smith from Cameroon, Africa.
Communique Editor: How are Community members reacting to this special training seminar? Are they excited?
Gene: I am not even sure that many of the Community members here in the Reno saw this seminar as being significant. They’re not in the meetings where people are struggling in Japan. The Community members in Japan are going through the same thing that we are: How to retain students? How do we better interact with them? How do we answer their questions as they go through the changes that people go through as they apply the System?
Communique Editor: Also, a lot of the people in Reno expected that we would be starting churches. That was the original plan, and now it looks like it is going to be centers of a different kind, not outright churches.
Gene: At least for now. Who knows how those things will work in the future, and even how the Community in Japan is expanding. Because now there is a group in Tokyo.
