Alternate Currents: Reiki’s Circulation in the Twentieth-Century North Pacific

by Justin B Stein

In the second half of the twentieth century, Reiki went from an obscure therapy practiced by a few thousand Japanese and Japanese Americans to a global phenomenon. By the early twenty-first century, people in nearly every corner of the world have undergone the initiations that authorize them to channel a cosmic energy―known as Reiki―to heal body, mind, and spirit. They lay hands on themselves and others, use secret symbols and incantations to send Reiki to distant recipients, and strive to follow five precepts to cultivate their spiritual growth. Reiki’s international rise and development is due to the work of Hawayo Takata (1900–1980), a Hawai‘i-born Japanese American woman who brought Reiki out of Japan and adapted it for thousands of students in Hawai‘i and North America, shaping interconnections across the North Pacific region as well as cultural transformations over the transwar period spanning World War II.

Alternate Reiki’s Circulation in the Twentieth-Century North Pacific analyzes how, from her training in Japan in the mid-1930s to her death in Iowa in 1980, Takata built a vast trans-Pacific network that connected Japanese American laborers on plantations in Hawai‘i to social elites in Tokyo, Hollywood, and New York; middle-class housewives in American suburbs; and off-the-grid tree planters in the mountains of British Columbia. Using recently uncovered archival materials and original oral histories, Justin B. Stein examines how these relationships between healer and patient, master and disciple, became deeply infused with values of their time and place and how they interplayed with Reiki’s circulation, performance, and meanings along with broader cultural shifts in the twentieth-century North Pacific. Highly readable and informative, each chapter is structured around a period in the life of Takata, the charismatic, rags-to-riches architect of the network in which Reiki spread for decades. Alternate Currents explores Reiki as an exemplary transnational spiritual therapy, demonstrating how lived practices transcend artificial distinctions between religion and medicine, and circulate in global systems while maintaining strong connections with the practices’ homeland.

332 pages, Hardcover

Published September 30, 2023

Reviews

[Molly Donlan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Incredible history, this should be required reading for all reiki master teachers. I am knocking it one star because it reads more like an academic paper than a book, often with long sentences and little commentary included. I found it to be very dense which is honestly what I was hoping it would be.

[Andy Quan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've practised reiki for probably over two decades, and have been giving treatments for over a decade. I didn't expect to be so engaged by what looks like a fairly academic book about reiki. Stein tells the story of reiki's development with a focus on Hawayo Takata, who really was the person who brought reiki from Japan and then seeded it through the North Pacific, from which it has now gone worldwide. And he tells it so well that it is accessible and engaging, and felt to me at times like a good novel!

I was actually quite challenged by the book, in a good way, to realise that the way I have been explaining reiki to my clients has particular historical roots and that the notion of a 'traditional' or 'Japanese' reiki is too simplistic. Reiki developed in many locations and many ways, so I think we really can't say that there is one form that is more pure than others. I also realise that some of the way that I explain reiki seemed to historically come from a desire to promote reiki and get its acceptance. I think I'm going to embrace more and accept the mystery of reiki henceforth.

Congratulations to Justin Stein for such a fascinating, engaging and useful book. I definitely recommend it to any reiki practitioner to have a better understanding and context for their own practice.