Alternate Currents

Reiki began as a little-known healing practice in Japan, followed by only a few thousand Japanese and Japanese Americans. In the second half of the twentieth century it grew into a worldwide movement. By the early 2000s, people on nearly every continent had received the initiations that allow them to channel a cosmic life force called Reiki in order to heal the body, mind, and spirit. Practitioners place their hands on themselves and on others, use hidden symbols and chants to send energy to people far away, and try to live by five guiding precepts meant to deepen their spiritual lives.

Much of this global spread traces back to Hawayo Takata (1900-1980), a Japanese American woman born in Hawai'i. She brought Reiki out of Japan and taught it to thousands of students in Hawai'i and across North America. Her work linked communities throughout the North Pacific and carried cultural change through the years of World War II. This book follows her life from her training in Japan in the mid-1930s until her death in Iowa in 1980. In that time she built a sprawling trans-Pacific network that reached from Japanese American plantation workers in Hawai'i to elites in Tokyo, Hollywood, and New York, from housewives in American suburbs to off-the-grid tree planters in the mountains of British Columbia.

Drawing on recently discovered archival records and firsthand oral histories, the author shows how the bonds between healer and patient and between master and disciple took on the values of their particular times and places. He also examines how those bonds shaped the way Reiki moved from person to person, how it was performed, what it came to mean, and how it responded to broader cultural shifts across the twentieth-century North Pacific. Each chapter is built around a stage in Takata's life, presenting her as a magnetic figure who rose from humble beginnings to become the architect of a network through which Reiki spread for decades.

The book treats Reiki as an example of a transnational spiritual therapy. It argues that lived practice does not fit neatly into the categories of religion or medicine, and that Reiki circulated through global systems while staying closely tied to its Japanese origins.