Hawayo Takata and the Circulatory Development of Reiki in the Twentieth Century North Pacific

Scholarly literature on religion in contemporary North America and Europe has taken Reiki, a form of spiritual healing, to be indicative of broader trends in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. These works generally assume Reiki is either a form of American unorthodox medicine in Oriental trappings or a form of Japanese religious practice that has found a place in Western biomedical settings. This dissertation avoids such characterizations by foregrounding transnational exchange instead of national culture. It argues Reiki is best understood as a product of the twentieth century North Pacific (specifically Japan, Hawaii, and North America). It proposes an analytical framework of “circulatory development” to understand Reiki’s movement through transnational networks. Circulatory development describes how the movement of practices transforms both the practices (as they are adapted for new audiences) and the people who encounter them (by embedding them in new social and spiritual relationships). This dissertation also proposes a category of “spiritual medicine” for practices that transcend the assumed differentiation of religious and medical spheres. Usui Mikao (1865–1926) fashioned Reiki’s earliest forms from a mix of elements in 1920s Japan, including some with long local histories and some that had been recently imported from North America. Since the mid twentieth century, Reiki’s most prevalent forms have been reconfigurations of Usui’s practice adapted for audiences in Hawaii and North America by a second-generation Japanese American named Hawayo Takata (1900–1980). Using archival materials and oral history interviews, this dissertation analyzes how Takata creatively transformed Reiki practice from the 1930s through the 1970s. It focuses on the relation between her gendered racialization as a Japanese American woman, her development of spiritual capital in social networks, and shifts in the meanings assigned to Japanese religion in Territorial Hawaii and mainland North America. It concludes that Takata’s innovations to Reiki practice both accommodated and resisted elements of North American cultural hegemony by gradually introducing practices intended to: 1) professionalize Reiki as a practice of spiritual medicine; 2) transmit “Japanese” values to her students, and 3) establish a form of “particular universalism” that valorized Japan while promoting Reiki as a “universal” practice.

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