Hawayo Takata

Hawayo Takata (23 December 1900 – 11 December 1980) was the Japanese-American Reiki teacher who introduced the practice to the Western world. She was born Hawayo Kawamura in Hanamaulu on the island of Kauai, in the then-Territory of Hawaii, into a Japanese immigrant family that worked the sugar plantations.

Widowed young after the death of her husband Saichi Takata, and in declining health in the early 1930s, she travelled to Japan and came to the Tokyo clinic of Chujiro Hayashi, a direct student of Reiki’s founder Mikao Usui.

After several months of Reiki treatments she reported a full recovery, and she went on to train under Hayashi, becoming the last Reiki master he personally initiated. Returning to Hawaii, Takata opened a healing practice and, over the following decades, became the sole conduit through which Reiki entered the United States and beyond.

In the last years of her life she trained twenty-two Reiki masters, and it is from this small group that virtually all “Western Reiki” lineages descend; she is also associated with formalising the practice as a paid professional teaching.

She died on 11 December 1980. As with the tradition she carried, Reiki’s claimed mechanism — a transferable universal energy — has no accepted scientific basis; the genuine and repeatable effects of the practice are the relaxation, reassurance, and comfort of attentive touch, consistent with placebo and the therapeutic relationship rather than a measurable energy field.