Reiki originated in Japan in 1922, developed by a man named Mikao Usui after a spiritual retreat on Mount Kurama near Kyoto. The word itself comes from two Japanese characters: “rei,” meaning universal, and “ki,” meaning vital energy. From its roots in early 20th-century Tokyo, the practice traveled to Hawaii in the 1930s and eventually spread across the Western world, changing significantly along the way.
Mikao Usui and Mount Kurama
The founding story of Reiki centers on a 21-day fasting and meditation retreat that Mikao Usui undertook on Mount Kurama, a sacred mountain north of Kyoto. During this retreat, Usui reportedly experienced a profound spiritual awakening and came to understand what he described as a healing energy he could channel through his hands. This account is recorded on Usui’s memorial stone at Saihoji Temple in Tokyo, which remains one of the primary historical records of his life.
By April 1922, Usui had settled in the Harajuku district of Aoyama, Tokyo, where he established the Usui Reiki Ryoho Gakkai, a society dedicated to teaching his healing method and offering treatments. The organization initially catered to naval officers and civilians, and demand was high. Historical accounts describe crowds so large that visitors’ shoes overflowed outside the building. Usui went on to set up teaching centers in other parts of the country.
In September 1923, the Great Kanto Earthquake devastated Tokyo. Usui and his students reportedly treated large numbers of injured people in the aftermath, which significantly raised the profile of Reiki in Japan. By the late 1920s and early 1930s, the practice had a substantial national following. One of Usui’s students, Toshihiro Eguchi, is said to have taught approximately 500,000 students between 1927 and 1933.
Japan’s Healing Culture in the 1920s
Reiki didn’t emerge in a vacuum. Early 20th-century Japan was undergoing rapid modernization following the Meiji era, and the psychological toll was widely felt. A condition called “shinkei-suijaku” (the Japanese term for neurasthenia, or nervous exhaustion) became recognized as a defining illness of the period. People attributed their anxiety, fatigue, and depressed moods to the strain of Japan’s dramatic social transformation.
Traditional Japanese medicine, known as Kampo, was declining but still active, and practitioners were trying to bridge it with Western biomedical concepts. Some doctors explained chronic illness through ideas about internal toxins and energy imbalance. This cultural landscape, where traditional energy-based thinking coexisted with a growing awareness of stress-related illness, provided fertile ground for a healing practice built around channeling life energy through the hands.
Chujiro Hayashi’s Role
Among Usui’s students, Chujiro Hayashi became the most important figure for Reiki’s eventual spread beyond Japan. A naval physician, Hayashi began studying with Usui in the early 1920s and quickly became one of his most prominent students. By 1925 he held the rank of Shihan (teacher), and in January 1926 he became a senior teacher and board member of the Usui Reiki Ryoho Gakkai.
After Usui’s death, Hayashi separated from the original society around 1927 or 1928 and founded his own group, the Hayashi Reiki Kenkyukai, in the Shinano-machi area of Tokyo. As a trained physician, Hayashi brought a more clinical sensibility to the practice. His branch would prove to be the direct link between Usui’s original teachings and the version of Reiki that eventually reached the West.
How Reiki Reached the West
The person responsible for bringing Reiki out of Japan was Hawayo Takata, a Japanese-American woman born in Hawaii. After completing her training under Hayashi in Japan, Takata returned to Hawaii and opened a small Reiki treatment practice in Kapaa on the island of Kauai. In late 1937, Hayashi himself traveled to Hawaii with his daughter, and together with Takata they embarked on a lecture tour to promote Reiki healing to American audiences.
The timing proved complicated. When Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, anti-Japanese sentiment surged across the United States. This likely influenced how Takata chose to teach. She appears to have deliberately stripped away many of the Japanese cultural and spiritual elements she had learned from Hayashi, possibly because she believed they would be poorly received or that Western students wouldn’t connect with them. What she taught instead was a simplified system built around a set of standardized hand positions she called the “foundation treatment.”
Takata also did not allow her students to take notes and never provided written materials. After her death, this oral tradition led to further drift. Students added hand positions, and some of the intuitive elements she had taught were lost or downplayed. The result was a Western style of Reiki that, while rooted in Usui’s original work, looked quite different from what was still being practiced in Japan.
Japanese and Western Reiki Today
The Usui Reiki Ryoho Gakkai that Usui founded in 1922 continued to exist in Japan throughout the 20th century, though it shrank considerably from its peak in the late 1920s and early 1930s. It remained relatively closed to outsiders, which meant that for decades, Western practitioners had little knowledge of the original Japanese techniques.
When contact between Japanese and Western Reiki communities eventually resumed, practitioners discovered notable differences. The Western style that descended from Takata emphasizes fixed hand placements applied systematically across the body. The Japanese tradition places more weight on intuitive scanning, where the practitioner’s hands are guided to areas that need attention rather than following a preset sequence. Western Reiki also tends to frame the practice in more universal spiritual terms, while the Japanese lineage retains stronger connections to its Buddhist and Shinto-influenced roots.
Both styles trace back to the same source: a man on a mountain outside Kyoto in 1922 who believed he had discovered something worth teaching. The different paths the practice took reflect less a disagreement about what Reiki is than the practical realities of war, cultural distance, and a teaching tradition that was never written down.