Reiki is everywhere now. You can find it in Manhattan wellness centers, Brooklyn studios, hospital integrative care programs, and corporate offices across all five boroughs. But a century ago, it did not exist. Not as a practice, not as a word, not as anything.
This is the story of how a Japanese healing method traveled from a sacred mountain near Kyoto to the streets of New York City. It involves a schoolteacher, a naval officer, a widowed Hawaiian woman, and a handful of dedicated practitioners who kept the tradition alive when it could easily have disappeared.
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 1865 | Mikao Usui born in Gifu Prefecture, Japan |
| 1922 | Usui's 21-day retreat on Mount Kurama; founds Usui Reiki Ryoho Gakkai in Tokyo |
| 1923 | Great Kanto Earthquake; Usui provides relief work, Reiki gains attention |
| 1926 | Usui dies; leaves 16-20 trained teachers |
| 1935 | Hawayo Takata receives treatment at Hayashi's clinic in Tokyo |
| 1937 | Takata returns to Hawaii, opens clinic in Kapaa |
| 1938 | Takata becomes 13th Reiki Master; Hayashi visits Hawaii |
| 1940 | Chujiro Hayashi dies in Atami, Japan |
| 1973 | Takata teaches first mainland US class in Puget Sound |
| 1980 | Takata dies, having trained 22 Masters |
| 1980s | Reiki arrives in New York City through Takata's students |
Mikao Usui and the Birth of Reiki
The story begins with Mikao Usui, born on August 15, 1865, in the village of Taniai in Japan’s Gifu Prefecture. Usui came from a family with samurai lineage and was raised in a devout Buddhist household. As a young man, he studied martial arts, medicine, psychology, and various spiritual traditions. He traveled to China and possibly to the West, always seeking to understand the nature of healing and enlightenment.
By the early 1920s, Usui was in his mid-fifties and had spent decades searching for answers. In March 1922, he climbed Mount Kurama, a sacred mountain northwest of Kyoto, to undertake a 21-day meditation and fasting retreat. According to the inscription on his memorial stone in Tokyo, something profound happened on the final day. A powerful spiritual experience struck him, and he emerged with a new understanding of how to channel healing energy.
He called what he discovered Reiki Ryoho, which translates roughly to “spiritual energy healing method.”
Within weeks, Usui moved to Tokyo. In April 1922, he established the Usui Reiki Ryoho Gakkai, a society dedicated to teaching and practicing this new healing method. His clinic in Harajuku quickly attracted visitors from across Japan. The timing was significant: Japan was modernizing rapidly, and there was a genuine hunger for practices that could bridge traditional wisdom with contemporary life.
Then came the Great Kanto Earthquake of September 1923. The disaster killed over 100,000 people and leveled much of Tokyo. Usui and his students threw themselves into relief work, treating the injured and traumatized. The visible results of their efforts brought Reiki to wider public attention. In the aftermath, demand for Reiki treatments and training surged.
Usui spent the remaining years of his life teaching. According to his memorial, he taught over 2,000 students and trained approximately 16 to 20 individuals as teachers who could pass on the practice. He died on March 9, 1926, at the age of 60, while traveling in Fukuyama. His body was buried in Tokyo, where his memorial stone still stands today.
Chujiro Hayashi: Building the Clinical Foundation
Among Usui’s students was Chujiro Hayashi, a retired naval officer and physician born in 1880. Hayashi had a clinical mindset and a practical approach to healing. After training with Usui, he opened his own Reiki clinic in Tokyo, reportedly near the Imperial Palace.
Hayashi made several important contributions to Reiki’s development. He systematized the hand positions used during treatments, creating a more structured approach that could be taught consistently to students. He refined the attunement process through which new practitioners were initiated. And he kept meticulous records of treatments and outcomes, bringing a more methodical sensibility to what had been a largely intuitive practice.
His clinic operated with multiple practitioners working in pairs, treating patients on tables in a manner that resembled a small hospital ward. Medical doctors sometimes referred difficult cases to Hayashi’s clinic when conventional treatments had failed.
It was through such a referral that the most important figure in Reiki’s Western journey first encountered the practice.
But Hayashi’s story does not end happily. In early 1938, he traveled to Hawaii to help his student Hawayo Takata establish Reiki there. When he returned to Japan, the political climate had darkened. War with the United States was approaching, and Hayashi, as a former naval officer who had just spent months in Hawaii, came under suspicion. According to accounts passed down through the Reiki community, the Japanese military pressured him to provide intelligence about military targets in Honolulu. He refused.
In the Japan of 1940, refusing such a request meant disgrace for himself and his family. The only honorable path, by the standards of his culture and class, was seppuku. On May 11, 1940, Chujiro Hayashi ended his life at his villa in Atami, near Mount Fuji. He was 59 years old.
His wife Chie took over the clinic and continued teaching for some years, but the Hayashi Reiki Kenkyukai eventually closed in the early 1950s. The lineage that would carry Reiki to the world now rested almost entirely on the shoulders of one woman in Hawaii.
Hawayo Takata: The Bridge to the West
Hawayo Takata was born on December 24, 1900, on the island of Kauai, Hawaii. Her parents were Japanese immigrants who worked on sugar plantations. She married young, had two daughters, and was widowed in 1930 when her husband died. Left to support her family alone, she worked herself to exhaustion and developed serious health problems, including a tumor, gallstones, and appendicitis.
In 1935, Takata traveled to Japan to visit family and seek medical treatment. She was admitted to a hospital in Tokyo and scheduled for surgery. But on the operating table, just before the procedure was to begin, she heard a voice telling her the surgery was not necessary. She asked the surgeon about alternatives and was referred to Hayashi’s Reiki clinic.
Takata received daily treatments for four months. She recovered completely.
Impressed by what she had experienced, Takata asked Hayashi to train her in Reiki. At first he refused. Reiki was traditionally taught only to Japanese men, and Takata was a Japanese-American woman, considered an outsider. But her persistence eventually won him over. In the spring of 1936, she began her training.
Takata received her first degree in 1936, her second degree in 1937, and in February 1938, she became the 13th and final Reiki Master initiated by Hayashi. She was the first Master trained outside of Japan and the first woman to reach that level.
Bringing Reiki to America
Takata returned to Hawaii in 1937 and opened a small clinic in Kapaa, modeled on Hayashi’s clinic in Tokyo. Hayashi himself visited Hawaii in early 1938 to help establish her practice and named her as his successor.
For the next three decades, Takata practiced Reiki in Hawaii, building a reputation as a powerful healer. She treated thousands of patients, including some high-profile clients. But she did not train any new Masters during this period. She was cautious about how and to whom Reiki should be passed on.
World War II created additional complications. Anti-Japanese sentiment was intense, and Takata had to be careful about how she presented a Japanese healing practice to American audiences.
Here is where the history gets complicated and, depending on your perspective, either pragmatic or problematic.
Takata adapted Reiki for Western audiences. She told stories about Usui’s background that later research has called into question. She described him as a Christian minister who had studied at the University of Chicago, details that have not been verified and that some historians now believe were fabrications designed to make Reiki more palatable to American Christians suspicious of Buddhist practices. She downplayed the Buddhist and Shinto elements of Reiki’s origins. She presented it as a universal healing technique rather than a specifically Japanese spiritual practice.
Was this deception? Or was it survival?
Consider her position. She was a Japanese-American woman in the 1940s and 1950s, a period when Japanese Americans had been forcibly interned, when anything associated with Japan was viewed with hostility. She had a healing practice she believed in deeply, one that had saved her own life. If presenting it as “Christian-compatible” and “universal” was the only way to keep it alive and share it with people who needed it, was that wrong?
There is no easy answer. What we can say is that Takata made choices that allowed Reiki to survive and spread. Without those adaptations, the practice might have died with her generation. The cost was a distorted history that practitioners are still sorting out today, as researchers have reconnected with Japanese Reiki traditions and discovered how much was changed or lost in translation.
It was not until the early 1970s that Takata began teaching on the United States mainland. In the fall of 1973, she traveled to Puget Sound in Washington State to offer her first Reiki class outside of Hawaii. This moment marked the beginning of Reiki’s spread across North America.
In 1976, she initiated her first mainland Reiki Master: John Harvey Gray, at the Trinity Metaphysical Center in Redwood City, California. He became only the third Master she had trained worldwide.
Over the next four years, Takata traveled extensively, teaching classes across the United States and Canada. By the time of her death on December 11, 1980, she had initiated 22 Reiki Masters. Every Western Reiki practitioner today can trace their lineage back through one of these 22 teachers to Takata, and through her to Hayashi and Usui.
Reiki Arrives in New York City
The exact date Reiki first arrived in New York City is difficult to pinpoint, but it came through Takata’s students in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
John Harvey Gray, who had studied directly with Takata, began traveling to New York City in the 1980s and 1990s to teach Reiki classes. He held workshops in Manhattan studios, introducing hundreds of New Yorkers to the practice. Gray continued teaching until his death in 2011, having trained over 15,000 students and given more than 10,000 treatments over his career.
Other Masters from Takata’s lineage also brought Reiki to the city. By the late 1980s, Reiki had established a foothold in New York’s wellness community. The American International Reiki Association was founded in the late 1980s, and the International Center for Reiki Training was established in 1991, both of which helped standardize training and create networks of practitioners.
New York City proved to be uniquely fertile ground for Reiki, and understanding why tells you something about both the practice and the city.
First, there is the stress. New York runs on cortisol. The subway delays, the rent payments, the professional competition, the sensory overload of eight million people sharing limited space. By the 1980s and 1990s, a generation of New Yorkers was burning out, and conventional medicine did not have great answers for chronic stress, anxiety, and the vague malaise that comes from never stopping. Reiki offered something different: an hour of stillness, human touch, and permission to do absolutely nothing.
Second, there is the diversity. New York has always been a port of entry for ideas as much as for people. Practices that might seem exotic or suspicious in homogeneous communities find ready acceptance in a city where everyone comes from somewhere else. By the time Reiki arrived, New Yorkers were already practicing yoga, exploring acupuncture, and experimenting with meditation traditions from multiple cultures. Reiki fit into an existing ecosystem of alternative wellness practices.
Third, there is the practical, skeptical character of New Yorkers themselves. This is not a city that accepts things on faith. People tried Reiki because they were desperate or curious, not because they believed in universal life energy. And enough of them felt better afterward that they kept coming back, and told their friends, and the practice spread through word of mouth rather than evangelism. In a city that prides itself on being hard to impress, Reiki earned its place.
Reiki in NYC Today
A century after Usui’s awakening on Mount Kurama, Reiki has become a fixture of New York City’s wellness landscape.
The practice is offered in dedicated Reiki centers across all five boroughs, from the established studios in Chelsea and the Upper West Side to newer spaces in Astoria and Park Slope. It is included in integrative medicine programs at major hospitals. Corporate wellness programs bring Reiki practitioners into offices for employee stress relief. Yoga studios and meditation centers offer Reiki as a complement to their other services.
The lineage that began with Usui, passed through Hayashi and Takata, and spread through her 22 Masters now includes millions of practitioners worldwide. Many of them are New Yorkers who first discovered Reiki when they were looking for something, anything, to help them cope with the demands of life in this city.
What Mikao Usui discovered on a mountain in Japan over a hundred years ago has traveled farther than he could have imagined. It crossed oceans, survived a world war, adapted to new cultures, and found a home in one of the busiest cities on earth. The journey continues. Every time a practitioner places their hands on a client in a Manhattan studio or a Brooklyn wellness center, they are participating in a tradition that stretches back through generations to a single man on a sacred mountain.
That lineage is not just historical interest. In a city where everyone is moving fast and connection can feel scarce, it is the thread that connects every session to something larger than the room.
Common Questions
Who invented Reiki?
Mikao Usui, a Japanese teacher and spiritual seeker, developed Reiki in 1922 after a 21-day meditation retreat on Mount Kurama near Kyoto.
How did Reiki come to the United States?
Hawayo Takata, a Japanese-American woman from Hawaii, learned Reiki in Japan in the 1930s and brought it to the US mainland in 1973. By her death in 1980, she had trained 22 Reiki Masters who spread the practice across North America.
Is modern Reiki the same as the original Japanese practice?
Not entirely. Takata adapted Reiki for Western audiences, and various lineages have developed their own variations. Some practitioners today study Japanese Reiki traditions to reconnect with the original practices.
Why does lineage matter in Reiki?
Lineage connects practitioners back to Usui through an unbroken chain of teacher-student attunements. It provides credibility and connects each session to a tradition larger than any individual practitioner.
When did Reiki arrive in New York City?
Reiki came to NYC through Takata’s students in the late 1970s and early 1980s. John Harvey Gray, who studied directly with Takata, taught classes in Manhattan throughout the 1980s and 1990s.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. Reiki is a complementary practice and should not replace professional medical treatment. If you have a health condition, consult a licensed healthcare provider before beginning any new wellness practice.