For its first years, Reiki was a wholly Japanese practice. Its journey outward began with one woman — Hawayo Takata — and a chance visit to a Tokyo clinic.
Takata’s journey
In 1935 Takata, a Japanese-American from Hawaii, travelled to Japan and was treated at Chujiro Hayashi’s Reiki clinic. Recovering, she stayed to learn the practice, and by 1938 had become a Reiki master. Returning home, she began to teach — the first person to bring Reiki outside Japan.
Reaching the world
Through the middle of the century Takata practised and taught across Hawaii and the American mainland. Late in her life she trained the twenty-two masters who would carry the work further still, and through them Reiki reached Canada and Europe in the decades that followed.
Adapting to a new home
The form that spread west, Usui Shiki Ryoho, was shaped for its new audience. Some Japanese elements were simplified or set aside, and the practice was often framed in the language of energy and healing familiar in the West. It remained recognisably Reiki, but with a character of its own.
A global practice
By the 1980s and 90s Reiki was practised around the world and had branched into many schools. In time, curiosity turned back toward its origins, and Western practitioners began to seek out the Japanese roots of the practice they had inherited.
Parts of this story were passed on orally and vary between accounts; the dates above follow the most commonly cited sources.