Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast, Episode 554, Laying on Hands, Part 2.

We left things off last time with Takata Hawaii making her way to Japan in 1935.

Within a year, she'd be back in the U.S. territory of Hawaii running, as she put it in an ad in a local paper, a, quote,

absolutely drugless Usui Reiki Sanitarium, as a way to make a living on her native island of Kauai.

So how did she get there? And how did she end up playing such an important role in the history of

Rakey? Because, just to spoil a little bit, Takata Hawaiyo is the reason why

you have probably heard of Reiki, but have not heard of something like Tairado, for example,

or any of the other New Age healing practices that existed in Imperial Japan.

Once again, we're forced to rely here primarily on recollections from Hawayo herself, several

decades after the fact, and do a degree of critical suspicion.

That's particularly true because this was a part of her life's narrative that Takata

Hawayo had told over and over again before making the recordings in 1979, which served

as the basis of her autobiography and are thus our source for this moment.

This is all, to put it another way, her origin story, and so one imagines the tale has been

manicured somewhat in the repeated and well-practiced telling. And to be clear, that's not

intended as a knock on her or an accusation of dishonesty.

We all have stories about ourselves that we tell over and over again, and in the offing,

we tend to think about how we tell them and the ways people have responded to that story

in the past and modify things to suit what we think our audience will like.

Anyway, according to Takata, her journey into Reiki in 1935 was the result of two separate,

you might call them revelations.

The first was what sent her to Japan.

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