Breaking Reiki history news out of Taiwan this week- 13th April 2025!
Fellow Reiki history researcher Min Wang has discovered a series of documents about Usui-sensei from 1904 in Taiwan’s digital national archives, including one written in Usui’s own hand (see the first two images attached). They are a bit difficult to read given the handwriting, but Wang has graciously transcribed the documents and written about them on his website (which I will link in the comments, as the algorithm prefers).
The timing of this discovery amidst the recent hubbub about Yokoi Tokio, which partly came about due to researchers’ frustrations with a lack of contemporary accounts of / by Usui-sensei, is rather surprising, but that’s how things happen sometimes! Below, I would like to summarize some of Wang’s findings and add some of my own thoughts.
The documents Wang found are from a file on Usui Mikao that was created when he was hired in August 1904 (shortly before his 39th birthday) as a member of a committee to investigate traditional Taiwanese customs (臨時台湾旧慣調査会) under the Civil Affairs Bureau (Minseikyoku 民政局) of Japan’s colonial government. This is the first primary source document corroborating the oral history (from the Usui Reiki Ryōhō Gakkai) that Usui-sensei worked for the Japanese statesman Gotō Shinpei, as Gotō was the Chief Civil Administrator of Taiwan at this time and would have been Usui’s supervisor.
This alone would have been very interesting, but the file also contained Usui’s own handwritten CV! It is no overstatement to say that this is one of the most important discoveries in the roughly 30 years of historical research into Usui’s life. Many of the points from this CV corroborate and deepen our understanding of points from the life stories recounted on Usui’s memorial stone, by Hawayo Takata, and in the Reiki ryōhō no shiori document (described below). The signature and writing style on the CV match existing prints of the five principles (gokai) in Usui’s hand that were given to members of the Usui Reiki Ryōhō Gakkai (see the third and fourth images attached – thanks to Olaf Böhm for permission to share the gokai image from his collection).
For a direct translation of the documents, please see Min Wang’s page (linked in the comments), but here I merged the sections from Usui’s education and work history and provided all dates and his age in the Western style. All notes in square brackets are comments (not in the original):
March 1885 [age 19]: graduated from the Middle School Division of Gifu Kayō School 岐阜華陽学校
April 1885 – February 1886 [age 19–20]: worked for Gifu Prefecture (monthly salary, 7 yen)
March 1886 – December 1888 [age 20–23]: worked as acting deputy manager / supervisor of Mino Products Association [in Mino City, Gifu] (monthly salary, 15 yen)
April 1889 – July 1891 [age 23–26]: studied English at Kanda Taisei Gakkan 神田大成学館 in Tokyo (now Taisei High School)
May 1892 – August 1894 [age 26 – 28]: founded and taught at [a school in Tokyo called] the Kanda Nisshin Gakkan 神田日新学館 to nurture gifted students.
March 1893 [age 27]: graduated from the Literature Department of Kanda Shibun Gakkai 神田斯文学会 [an institution for the study of classical Chinese]; studied psychology under Dr. Motora Yūjirō [one of Japan’s first experimental psychologists, who would be named the first chair of psychology at Tokyo Imperial University later that year]
April 1893 [age 27]: entered second year at Japan Law School (now Nihon University), where he completed studies through the first semester of the third year
March 1894 [age 28]: received an elementary school teacher’s license from the Tokyo Prefectural Office
May 1895 – December 1896 [age 29–31]: studies psychology and philosophy at the “American Hocking [or Hawking?] School” (アメリカ・ホッキングスクール)
January 1897 – December 1898 [age 31–33]: worked in San Francisco, USA (monthly salary of 75 USD)
March 1899 – February 1903 [age 33–37]: commissioned by an American ladies’ missionary society [likely the Women’s Foreign Missionary Society for the Methodist Episcopal Church] to establish a charity school and an elementary school in Fukagawa, where he served as supervisor (annual salary of 300 USD)
June 1899 – August 1901 [age 33–35]: established and supervised a night middle school in North Asakusa, Tokyo [I believe this school may have been run by the same women’s missionary society]
March 1903 – May 1904 [age 37–38]: served as a consultant at the Tanaka Iron Works in Fukagawa (monthly salary of 50 yen)
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As you can see, this document greatly enhances our knowledge of Usui-sensei’s life prior to founding Usui Reiki Ryōhō. As such, it is a very timely discovery, given some recent questions regarding this very point. Moreover, several points in the CV corroborate aspects from the other narratives we have of Usui-sensei’s life.
For example, the memorial stone at sensei’s grave at Saihōji says, “As a youth, he studied hard and surpassed his peers. When he became older, he traveled to the West, and studied in China… He liked to read, ranging from history, biographies, medical texts, and Buddhist and Christian scriptures. He was well-versed in every art, including psychology…” Usui’s CV establishes that he had studied classical Chinese, studied psychology with one of the pioneers of that field in Japan and the United States, and even been allowed (seemingly) to skip the first year of law school based on the merit of his earlier studies. It’s possible that his period in Taiwan, researching local customs for Japan’s colonial government, is the period of study in “China” referenced in this text.
The Reiki ryōhō no shiori (1974) text attributed to the Usui Reiki Ryōhō Gakkai says that “Usui Mikao studied hard in his youth, including several periods of study abroad in the West. He also gained various life experiences professionally, working as a public servant, a company employee, a newspaper reporter, a missionary, a teacher [or possibly prison chaplain; the term is 教誨], and a businessman.” Again, the CV provides evidence for most of these details, although just one period of study abroad and nothing about working as a reporter. In most discussions of this document, there has been a lot of speculation about what kind of missionary (布教師) Usui may have worked as; the fact that he appears to have helped an American (Christian) women’s missionary society establish schools in Tokyo (more on this below) may help to answer this question.
Finally, although it does not track exactly, it also resonates with aspects of Hawayo Takata’s story of Usui. Much has been made recently of her claim that Usui was “the principal of the Doshisha University in Kyoto,” which she said on a well-known recording of her telling the story of Reiki’s origins. But it is also worth noting that Takata often told stories a little differently, depending on the day and possibly the audience (one of her Masters, Shinobu Saito, said she never heard Takata tell a story the same way twice), and that in the books by Helen Haberly (who had other recordings of Takata’s stories, some of which have since been lost), and Takata’s Master student Fran Brown, it simply says Usui was “the head of a Christian boy’s school in Kyoto” (Haberly 1990: 2) or “the head of a Christian boy’s school in Japan” (Brown 1992: 46). That Usui’s CV, written in his own hand, states that he was the founding director of a missionary school in Tokyo (specifically Fukagawa, which was considered a slum at that time) provides a better-substantiated peek into the story that Takata heard secondhand from her teacher circa 1935, which provided seeds for her (more imaginative?) retellings some forty years later.
Every discovery provides avenues for further research. I have already spent some time this week trying to track down what institution was referenced as the “American Hocking / Hawking School” where Usui seems to have studied psychology and philosophy in 1895–1896. Given that, after ~18 months at that school, he found work in San Francisco, the school may have been near there.
I also discovered that the Women’s Foreign Missionary Society for the Methodist Episcopal Church had day schools in Fukagawa and Asakusa, the two neighborhoods where Usui says that he worked for an American women’s missionary society. That society’s English-language annual reports have been digitized, and I went through the reports between 1897 and 1903, but found nothing particularly relevant to further corroborate and detail the story. The most relevant information is that I saw that the society’s annual appropriations for the Fukagawa Day School in 1900–01 and 1901–02 were $400 USD and Usui said that he received an annual salary of $300; later in that same report, it said “The day schools in Tokyo… are situated in the most neglected parts of the city, with their earnest Christian teachers are [sic] lights shining in darkness that bring the light of Truth to many” (Thirty-Second Annual Report, Women’s Foreign Missionary Society, Methodist Episcopal Church, 1900–1901, 109, 165). Perhaps an archive exists in Japan that could be helpful to find more information containing a reference to Usui here.
But we now know much that we did not know before and for this I am very grateful to Min Wang and his associates Umi Chien and Yu Hsuan who have assisted with this research. Just today, Wang posted another document found by Umi, which suggests Usui stayed in Taiwan for at least 4 years. I look forward to what other discoveries might come out of these Taiwanese documents regarding Usui-sensei’s life prior to founding his reiki ryōhō and also following up on some of these new avenues of research that they have opened up.
Article posted on Facebook by Justin B. Stein, Reiki Researcher on 13/4/2025
