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So over the course of this podcast, I've covered a decent variety of what we could call new religious movements, the syncretistic religions that began to emerge in the late Edo years and continue today as a collection of ideas borrowed from existing traditions. to fit the challenges of our modern times. Today I want to look at something that's kind of a religious practice, but also you see it very often divorced from that context.
It's a belief system supposedly grounded in religious history, but also a sort of commodified mystic teaching that you often see practiced by those with no connection to the belief system it really supposedly grew out of. Indeed, the term for the practice itself... has become somewhat disassociated with the actual ideas it refers to, in much the same way that many in the English-speaking world use the word Zen not to refer to a specific sect of Mahayana Buddhism,
but to anything that's vaguely calming and has an Asian-y aesthetic. Today, we're going to talk about Reiki, a practice which has roots in Japan, but which was actually popularized overseas. Now, a few things to get into before we get into it. First and foremost, I am not a Reiki practitioner or a believer. I consider myself very skeptical about these things.
I won't actually try and get into the stuff I do believe, because in the finest Jewish tradition, if I did, there'd be a literal whole episode just on that. But suffice it to say... Reiki is not something I think has any validity as an actual objectively effective practice. However, I do think that part of being a good historian is trying your best to be objective.
And in this case, that means approaching Reiki from the angle of, even if I personally don't believe in this, why do so many people find value in it? If you are a practitioner of Reiki or a believer in its efficacy,
I cannot promise you will like what I have to say here, but I will do my best to be neutral, at least as much as I can be, because I do believe that is important. That said, particularly in our age of pseudoscience and disinformation, I feel it is important to use my platform to note that there is no scientific evidence that Reiki is effective, merely a great many anecdotes, and, to quote that old statistical maxim, the plural of anecdote is not data.
So I want to be clear, I'm interested in the history of Reiki as a sort of religious-slash-spiritual tradition in the same way that we looked at, say, Zen Buddhism. There's plenty of interesting debate and discussion to be had there, There is not, in my opinion, any debate or discussion to be had as to the question of whether Reiki quote-unquote works. It very clearly does not.
So this should get me some fun, angry emails, probably about as many as the Soka Got Guy episodes did, but hey, that's what the block button's for. Second, we should probably define what Reiki is for those who have only tangentially heard of it, which is kind of challenging because, as I've noted, Reiki is often used to refer... both to a specific practice, but also increasingly as a kind of catch-all signifier for any sort of New Age belief attached to energy, intention, touch, or the like.
Historian Justin Stein, the main English-language academic who focuses on the history of Reiki, defines it with five key features. And by the way, Stein's work on the history of Reiki, or at least his biggest one, which is called Alternate Currents, Reiki's Circulation in the 20th Century North Pacific, is the main source I'm working with for these two episodes.
and is pretty fundamentally different from my own perspective. Dr. Stein, you see, is a Reiki practitioner and has been for 20 years, and he's very upfront about that in his work. and the challenges of the sort of dual identity of the scholar-practitioner in writing about something that's a part of their own lives. So if you are interested in this subject and want a different perspective than mine, he is where you should be going.
That said, I'd also recommend you be a little wary. There are areas where, in my view as a historian, I do think Stein is more credulous than he should be about some of the stories he's repeating. and not really digging into details or trying to verify anything, so take that for what it's worth. Anyway, first, Reiki is focused on the idea of a healing touch, or using one's hands to heal oneself or others.
What exactly that means in practice has varied over time, but that element of connection using the hand has been a constant. Second, Reiki involves a sort of grading of practitioners with various rankings in the practice. usually attached to paid classes that culminate in some sort of initiation or empowerment ceremony. There are, in fact, ranks in this system, culminating in the position of Shihan, or instructor, a Reiki master.
Third, as one climbs the ranks, memorization of characters thought to have special powers of various kinds becomes important. These symbols are not taught to outsiders, though we do know they are distinguished using the same stroke counts used to divide up kanji into easier or harder characters. They're part of the initiation for practitioners of the second level and above.
These supposedly can be used for what's called distance treatment for those not present or for spiritual intervention on broader situations rather than a specific person. Fourth, Reiki practitioners trace their lineage back to a specific founding figure, Usui Mikao. Usui, so the narrative goes, had a spiritual or mystical experience in 1922,
while visiting Mount Kurama to the north of Kyoto, a sacred mountain that, among other things, is supposed to be home of the king of the winged Tengu goblins. Usui meditated for 21 days atop Mount Kurama, at which point he was granted the ability to heal others with an energy he called Reiki. That name literally means something like soul or spirit energy.
The Rei is the same character in yurei, meaning ghost, while ki is of course another Japanese word people in the West tend to at least recognize. Broadly, it's something like energy. That term is older than Reiki itself. The word dates back to the Chinese term, lin qi, which in traditional Chinese medicine refers to something loosely approximating the soul, but also to a sort of... mystical divine presence when you feel the kind of magic of the gods. You are feeling their Reiki.
Usui, so he claimed, was also granted the ability to access Reiki within others, and thus began a lineage of the oral transmission of the Reiki practice. In theory, much like with Zen Buddhism, for example, anyone who practices Reiki does not learn it from, say, a book. They learn directly from a master who teaches them awakens them, initiates them in this sort of chain of instruction going back to Usui himself.
In fact, the various initiation ceremonies one goes through are based on Usui's own experience. Usually the students assume his role, they sit, they bow, they pray, and an instructor grants them access to the ability to channel Reiki. Finally, practitioners are supposed to internalize five basic principles in Japanese Gokai to guide their behavior.
Those principles have been translated and changed over time, but broadly they represent a commitment to living for the day, to refraining from anger or worry, and to instead live with diligence, kindness, and gratitude. Now, keen-eared listeners will note we can already draw some pretty interesting parallels between Reiki and other Japanese new religions, many of which sprung up in pre-World War II Japan around the same time Reiki itself first emerged.
These new religions would often claim to hybridize ideas from existing religions into a new teaching, which was also ancient and primordial, that could help with the trials and tribulations of modern living. There's also a lot of resemblance to practices from Zen to the martial arts to the tea ceremony in terms of reliance on grading practitioners and notions of lineage going back to certain masters.
and in particular the giving of specialized knowledge, the okuden, or inner teachings, only to those who have studied long enough to qualify. So what that tells us is that Reiki is very much a product of its historical circumstances. Like other new religions, like, say, Ōmoto, it emerged out of the uncertainties of the modern era, and, like many other Japanese arts,
It relies on a system of student-teacher relationships that are very close and involve the guarding of secret knowledge related to the art. But that doesn't tell us very much, of course, about where Reiki comes from. just that it doesn't represent too radical a break from other cultural or religious trends of its time. To know where it comes from, you have to know a bit more about two people.
One of them is, of course, Usui Miko, the person we're going to focus on the most this episode, though it might actually surprise you to learn that in a certain sense he's the less important of the two figures we're going to be talking about. Still, he is the inventor of Reiki, so it behooves us to spend at least a little time with him. Sorting out fact from fiction when it comes to Usui Mika'o is a rather extreme challenge.
because of his prophetic role in the Reiki mythos, and because of the vast, vast number of people writing about him today who are Reiki adherents and, frankly, tend to be extremely credulous about what they hear about this guy. Just to point out one of the more obvious examples, many English-language websites on Reiki mistakenly render the mountain upon which Usui received the Reiki revelation as Kuriyama,
a completely different place from Kuramayama or Mount Kurama. As a result, more than a few English-language Reiki practitioners have accidentally taken pilgrimages to the wrong mountain. Kuramayama, as we've established, is north of Kyoto, while Kuriyama is Niwate prefecture in the north end of Honshu. Some of these English-language sources also occasionally describe Usui as receiving his revelation in
the mid-19th century, which would be very impressive given that he wasn't born until 1865. Sorting fact from fiction is a challenge, is what I'm getting at here. So, what do we actually know? Well, Usui was born in Taniyai, a small village in what's now Gifu Prefecture in 1865, in the mountainous interior of Honshu.
1865 is, of course, a hell of a year to be born, because that meant he was coming into his own as a child and eventually a young man during the chaotic early years of the Meiji state. Very likely, he attended a terracoya or temple school, run out of Zendolji, the local Pure Land Buddhist temple. At some point in turn, he probably transferred over to a new state-run public school, but record-keeping from this period is uneven at best, so it's hard to ascribe any specific dates here.
What we do know is that his father, Usui Uzaemon, was part of the Gono class, the wealthy wing of the peasantry that actually owned land and could afford to finance side businesses.
Uzayamon specifically was a merchant sometimes who had also served as a headman of his village. His father had been a sake brewer. Unfortunately, that's pretty much it before everything gets murky again. Our best source on Usui's life... is unfortunately a memorial stele erected in Tokyo by his own followers, which for somewhat obvious reasons we should be a bit skeptical about.
That steely claims that as a young man, Usui undertook the academic study of both Buddhist and Christian scripture, as well as medicine, psychology, history, and more esoteric practices like Taoist geomancy or feng shui, and divination using the I Ching, or Book of Changes. Other texts put out by followers in the late 20th century claimed he was everything from a prison warden to a Buddhist chaplain to a businessman.
Some even claim that he was the private secretary of Goto Shinpei, one of the fathers of the Meiji state, though there's no evidence of that or reference to Isui in any of Goto's very well-documented and studied papers. You also sometimes see claims that he was associated with, or even president of, Doshisha University, one of the most prominent private universities in Japan during the Meiji years, and the only one that was an explicitly Christian institution.
Once again, there's no evidence of that. It's pretty clear that story was invented out of whole cloth by another figure we'll get to in a bit who wanted to add some Christian bona fides to Reiki's origins. in order to assuage the concerns of white North American Christians about the practice. Piecing any of this together into a cohesive story is basically impossible.
It seems pretty clear that by 1919, Usui had abandoned whatever more conventional career path he'd been pursuing, and it does seem to be the case that his interests were pretty wide-ranging. to pursue some kind of religious esotericism. Why, again, is not clear. It's suggested he experienced some kind of business setback, and certainly 1919 was a pretty turbulent time for the Japanese economy.
Remember, that's the summer of the Rice Riots, which culminated in massive protests that saw sweeping democratic reforms to bring them to an end. In the aftermath of whatever got him out of business, Usui relocated to Kyoto, spending several years pursuing a religious vocation culminating in his trip to Mount Kurama in 1922 and his 21 days of intense meditation.
During that meditation, he claimed to have fasted and performed severe austerities, among other things meditating under waterfalls, since that practice is very associated with pilgrimage to Karama.
The actual revelation that took place at the end of these meditations has been described differently depending on the source. Usui's memorial stele says simply that on the 21st day, he quote, suddenly felt great reiki overhead and instantly acquired reiki therapy the longest surviving text by the man himself the koukai denju setsume show or public explanation of instruction
is written in the form of a series of questions from students and answers by usui and in terms of his revelation what he says was i was mysteriously inspired after being touched by taiki during a fast although i am the founder of this method even i cannot explain how it works that term taiki is a complicated one in modern japanese it refers to the literal atmosphere but you sometimes see it rendered as ether or something similar. Literally, it's just Great Key, an overwhelming spiritual force.
Obviously, there's no way to verify any of this or whether it actually happened, it's simply not possible given the nature of the experience itself. I do think it's worth noting, though, that this general narrative arc, a mundane life from which something is missing, a turn to religion to fill that gap, a revelatory experience, is pretty standard for founders of new religious movements.
It fits, for example, the story of Deguchi Nao, the founder of the new religion of Oomoto-kyo, which we talked about back in episodes 262 to 263. I mean, it's more or less the life story of Siddhartha Gautama, the actual Buddha. What came next is much clearer. After his revelation, Usui decided to begin finding ways to teach his method, which he did not want to just hoard for himself.
Thus he made his way to Harajuku in Tokyo, where he was residing in April of 1922. There he opened his first training hall, dojo was the term he used, and to my understanding some Reiki schools still use that term today. That space in turn was the first associated with the Usui Association, which he founded to promote his teachings and organize his students.
usui would run his association and teach about two thousand students until his early death in march of nineteen twenty six about twenty of those students were trained up to the level of shihan or instructor and it was these men who served most directly to promote the Usui Association and Reiki in the aftermath of Usui Mikau's death. Interestingly, of these 20, all of whom, by the way, were men, six were military officers, four of them from the navy.
In fact, the man who took over the presidency of the Usui Association after Usui Mikau's death, Ushida Juzaburo, was a rear admiral. Which might seem a bit odd at first. Why would military officers be so interested in healing techniques? It's true that, as Justin Stein notes in his research, The navy in particular had a large number of officers who were invested in newer esoteric religions. It actually had a lot of Ōmoto-kyo adherents until that religion was suppressed in 1921.
In addition, as he notes, it does kind of make sense that military officers would be interested in this stuff. After all, if you really believe in it, Reiki treatment would seem very effective on a ship with limited space for a sickbay. or for storage of medicine or medical devices. But I do think Stein misses a few things here.
It's worth remembering the 1920s are also the start of that period of the turn against the West, the rejection of Westernization or Western ideas by large swaths of Japanese society. Reiki practice, which Usui and his followers often positioned as this sort of rediscovery of healing techniques and traditions that have a long history in Japanese mysticism, fits the pattern of this cultural moment.
particularly in a society where, let's not forget, Shinto myth was taught as a literal truth in classrooms. In the military realm as well, the 1920s was a period of pretty intense fervency among members of the officer corps, particularly in the army but also the navy, around ideas of Yamato Damashi and the power of Japanese Seishin.
Those two terms mean something like Japanese spirit, the idea that Japanese people have this near superhuman spiritual fortitude that gave them a strength well beyond others.
and which became a very important notion for the worldview of Japanese militarists and fascists in later decades. It's not that much of a stretch that a member of the officer corps primed with beliefs like Japanese spirit will enable us to defeat American or British advantages in material and technology could also come to believe that that spiritual power has healing components as well.
That's particularly true because Usui was more than willing to incorporate a healthy dose of Japanese nationalism into his teachings. One of the practices he instructed his followers on was the recitation of poems produced by the Meiji Emperor himself. The theory, so it goes, was to use the words of the emperor, who after all was a literal descendant of the gods, to connect with a divine directly, doing in a literary sense what Reiki offered in a spiritual one.
More broadly, Usui's Reiki found adherents among a surprisingly high-status group of followers. A wealthy fertilizer baron named Tomabechi Gizo was among Usui's 20 Shihan, or masters, as was a corporate executive named Tanaka Eihachiro. Tanaka actually introduced Reiki to none other than Shibusawa Eiichi, probably the single most famous and important businessman of this entire period.
shibusawa received treatments from reiki practitioners in 1925 the prestige of the movement's followers though didn't save it from mass ridicule by others One journalist who wrote about his experience in 1928 had this to say about Reiki, quote, At that time, I recalled the founder of this therapy is said to be one of Japan's three fraudulent wizards. And frankly, that attitude seems to reflect how most people in Japan thought about this stuff.
Outside of a circle of a few thousand adherents, most people don't seem to have thought that much about Usui-style Reiki at all. Which, frankly, is not very surprising. These sort of esoteric practices claiming to give someone the ability to manipulate spirit energy were very common in pre-war Japan.
Just to give a few examples, we have Tanaka Morihei, born in 1884, so a few years Usuya's junior, and founder of a discipline he called Tireido, which he claimed enabled him to channel reishi, or spirit particles. Then we have Matsumoto Chiwaki, born in 1872, and his Jintai Housha no Ryouhou, or Human Body Radioactive Therapy.
Meanwhile, the first modern spiritualist to even use the term Reiki was not Usui Mikao, but a Meiji spiritualist named Tamari Kizo, an agricultural scientist who tried to recast this mystic notion from Chinese medicine. to refer to the forces that made plants grow. What I'm getting at here is that while Usui's practices were distinct in some ways, particularly his addition of ideas picked up from esoteric Buddhism,
like his initiation system and a reliance on the oral tradition, they weren't out of left field for the period. This was an age of spiritual revival in Japan, and around the world it was the height of the so-called spiritualist movement. That movement as the name implies is all about the idea that one can make contact with the so-called spirit world through mediums capable of channeling it.
So broadly, this is just a time where the claim that you have access to divine power given to you from the heavens was still unusual, but more common than you might think. And like many of these other spiritual movements, it didn't take long for Usui's association to begin to splinter. In 1927, the year after his death, one of his shihan, Hayashi Chujiro, broke away to form his own...
Hayashi-style Reiki movement. The main difference from Usui Reiki from what I could find is that Hayashi reorganized the progression of the various courses to make them faster and more accessible. particularly for students who couldn't afford to train with a Shihan on the regular or who lived out in the middle of nowhere and just couldn't find someone to train with. Making his teachings more accessible led to Hayashi Reiki,
growing to somewhere between 4,000 to 5,000 adherents by the mid-1930s. His particular branch of Reiki is also pretty important for our story, because one of the people he will train is the woman who, after the end of the Second World War, will bring Reiki to the American continent and turn it into what it is today. Her name is Takata Hawayo, and she's probably, at least in terms of understanding Reiki from a historical perspective, the single most important figure in its history.
Now, Takata's life is simultaneously better and worse documented than Usui Miko's. We have a clearer idea of what she was up to, but most of our sources come directly from the woman herself. and are thus subject to two potential issues we always have to be aware of when we're relying on oral history. The first is true of really any primary source. People always have biases and agendas, and that affects what they say.
That's true in direct ways, of course. People lie sometimes, but also indirect ones. Our biases might shape how we choose to remember something, the so-called Rashomon effect, or how we interpret that event, that in turn becomes to us how it happened. To be clear, any recollection of the past, any primary source, really has that potential issue.
Oral histories specifically have one additional thing you have to remember. People just misremember stuff. Time alters memories, makes you forget things or jumble them up. And much of what we know about Takata Hawayo's life comes from tapes she recorded later in her life to help with the production of her book, Reiki is God Power, in 1979.
79 years after her birth and half a century after her time in Japan studying Reiki. That said, as I am sometimes fond of telling my students, we have the sources we have, so we just have to make the best of them. So Takata Hawayo was born on December 24th, 1900, to Kawamura Hatsu and Kawamura Otogoro, their third child after a child named Kawayo, who died after just 10 days, and a son, Kazuo,
who would die tragically young at 23. Her parents were plantation laborers working for the Lihue Plantation Company on the island of Kauai in the Hawaiian Islands.
Hawaii, which had just become a US territory that very year, was littered with white-owned plantations, and in fact those plantations had been the major force behind the overthrow of Hawaii's indigenous monarchy, and its annexation into the united states and these plantations in turn required a great deal of labor and for decades by 1900 owners had been looking overseas to bring workers to hawaii to provide it
Initially, they had turned to China. The first Chinese immigrants to Hawaii had started to arrive looking for work in the mid-1860s, many of them fleeing the aftermath of the disastrous Taiping Rebellion and Civil War. By the mid-1880s, 22% of the island's population was Chinese.
However, as the Chinese population grew, Chinese laborers began to band together, establish their own businesses, and compete with white-owned ones while also demanding higher wages, and as a result, plantation owners started looking elsewhere for labor. to Japan. The mid-1880s was a good time to do this from a business perspective.
In 1885, Japan lifted long-standing laws restricting both domestic and overseas population migration, in large part because the economic situation on the islands was very dire.
Poor fiscal discipline in the 1870s led to a financial crisis in the early 1880s. The finance minister brought in to deal with this, Matsukata Masayoshi, did so successfully but at the cost of some draconian financial measures to create deflation, which required producing widespread poverty in a countryside that was already falling behind economically. Mortgage foreclosures and bankruptcies were rampant in the countryside, and tenant farmers often found themselves out of a home and a job.
Riots were not uncommon, particularly because a part of the financial retrenchments of Matsukata was a big increase in land tax rates.
So it's not that surprising that many Japanese farmers just decided to up stakes and try their luck in Hawaii instead. In fact, in just five years, from 1885 to 1890, Ethnic Japanese people went from a minuscule fraction of Hawaii's population to 42% of it, a sign of just how desperate things were in the countryside and how high the demand for labor was on Hawaii.
Kawamura Otogoro, the father, came from Yamaguchi Prefecture in the westernmost tip of Honshu, while Hatsu, the mother, came from Hiroshima. These rural western prefectures were the source of much of the Japanese immigration into Hawaii. By the time of the Immigration Act of 1924, which basically banned all further Asian immigration to the U.S., about 90% of Hawaii's ethnically Japanese population came from the four westernmost prefectures of Honshu,
Yamagata, Hiroshima, Shimane, and Okayama, plus Okinawa Prefecture. Anyway, in terms of what we know about the young life of Takata Hawayo, all we really have to go on are her later recollections, And by the way, as you might have guessed, Takata is a marital name, and at this point she still would have been Kawamura Hawaio, but she's much better known by her married name, so I'm just going to use that to avoid confusion. Anyway.
Her recollections read to me, at least, like someone who was, as she was telling these stories in 1979, self-consciously constructing an image for herself, or already having done that, just recollecting that image, as a religious figure. Here, for example, is Takata's recollection of the instructions given by her mother to the midwife after her birth. Please give her a bath, wrap her in a new blanket, and face her to the sun.
And then I want you to initiate her by putting a hand on top of her head and saying, I name you Hawaio. And say it three times. And after that, she said, success, success, and success. So this was my initiation into the world. Now, there's a lot here that has very clearly been edited in the offing. For example, the laying of hands on the forehead is a part of Reiki initiation ceremonies, and just generally, of course, touch is very important to the whole process.
The Rising Sun imagery is of course evocatively Japanese, given the nationalist significance of the Rising Sun, and references the religious role attached to Amaterasu, the Sun Goddess, in Shinto Myth. Frankly, the whole effect is very unsubtle if I had to pick a word to describe it. Despite these ostensibly portentous beginnings, from what we can see, Takata's early life was decidedly normal.
She attended both a local American school and a Japanese religious school, intended to teach her the family language and traditions, probably attached to the Nishi Honganshi sect of Jodo Shinshu, or True Pure Land Buddhism, which was what her parents were affiliated with. She was apparently a pretty good student but her family was very poor, limiting her access to opportunities for education outside the bare minimum.
By the time she was 12, she was already working part-time in the plantation fields, and would later recall at one point literally falling to her knees and praying that, quote, God would give me something better to do with my hands. Fortunately for her, she wouldn't be in the fields very long, she was very slight in terms of her physical build, and sugar farming is notoriously hard labor.
Instead, by the time she was 13, she was living in a boarding school associated with her family's Nishihonganji sect, working as a substitute first grade teacher. And honestly, I literally can't imagine being 13 and having to manage a room full of seven-year-olds. That takes some real skill and patience. If that wasn't enough, she also took up two more jobs as an ice cream scooper at the plantation store as well as a clerk in the shop's record-keeping office.
and wherever she went people were apparently very impressed by her diligence and she quickly came to the attention of one of the shop's repeat customers julia mckee spalding twenty-four years her senior and a member of a wealthy white family that owned its own plantation kealia plantation on the same island of kauai julia spalding in turn must have been very impressed with young takatahawayo
because by the time the latter was 16, she was working full-time at Valley House, the sprawling Spalding Mansion, at the heart of the family sugarcane fields. Hawaii would in turn work her way up the Spalding family house staff to the eventual position of head housekeeper, and would remain employed by the family for almost two decades. Takata Hawayo herself remembered all this pretty fondly. Julia would eventually finance some of Hawayo's first forays into, among other things, naturopathy.
However, the Spaldings were also fascinated by a lot of peculiar notions around oriental aesthetics, and day-to-day hawayo and any other Nikkei or people of Japanese descent working for the Spalding household were made to dress in fancy kimono, which Hawaio later recalled, quote, made me look like a living Japanese doll.
The family was also apparently very fond of Oriental-themed parties that did include them dressing up, and which are exactly as cringe-inducingly problematic as you are thinking. It was also while working for the Spauldings that Hawayo met one Takata Saichi, and as the name might suggest, the two of them were married by the spring of 1917.
They would have two children, Julia, the eldest, named for Julia Spaulding, and Alice, born seven years later in 1925. By all accounts, it was a very loving marriage, and Saichi himself was a very successful member of the Nikkei community. He helped run the plantation's warehouses and manage its business dealings, which was not a job commonly falling to non-white workers during this time, indicative of his talent and ability to network.
In fact, Saichi was really successful during this time. He was actively involved in Kaalia's Young Men's Buddhist Association. a member of the local school board, as well as the founding president of the Society of American Citizens of Japanese Ancestry of Kauai, and even an appointee to the State Child Welfare Board by the island's governor.
He was even a member of the local country club and in fact came in second in its first ever golf tournament in 1921, the only non-white participant out of 11 people.
There were limits, of course, on how far the newly minted Takata family could rise. Saichi was listed on the McKee Sugar Company payroll as a store boy, and while he made more than most Japanese-American clerks, he didn't make anywhere near as much money as the white leadership of the company, a rank he could of course never realistically aspire to.
Still, the family made enough money to live comfortably. They even bought a house for themselves in town. But by 1923, Saichi began to encounter health problems, a lung issue diagnosed as pleurisy. The couple decided to seek care in Japan, about the same distance as the mainland US would be and after all they spoke the language, and Saichi ended up getting surgery at Keio University Medical School that included having two of his ribs removed.
This alleviated things for a time, but starting in 1928, his condition worsened, and two more trips to Japan in 1928 and 1929 didn't see any improvement. On October 8, 1930, Takata Saichi died at the age of 34 in the family home at Kailia. Takata Hawaio carried on alone, working odd jobs to keep the family financially afloat, But in 1935, she started to take ill herself. In October of that year, she headed to Japan for treatment. And one year later, she would be back in Kauai operating a clinic.
which was offering an absolutely drugless method of miracle medical treatment, Usui Reiki Therapy. How'd she get there? We'll find out next week. For now, that's all for this week. Thank you very much for listening. This show is a part of the Facing Backward podcast network. You can find out more about this show at facingbackward.com. Special thanks this week to new donor to the history of Japan Patreon, Nancy, for supporting the show.
Thanks again for listening, and I'll see you next week for the second and last part on our history of Reiki. Whether it's a next step in your studies or taking your career to the next level, Newcastle College University Centre has the degree for you. From business to hospitality, rail to sport, we've over 60 practical degree courses to get you work ready.
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