Alternate Currents : Reiki's Circulation in the Twentieth-Century North Pacific / Justin B. Stein.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Stein, Justin B., Author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Reiki (Healing system)--Hawaii.

Reiki (Healing system).

Reiki (Healing system)--Japan.

Reiki (Healing system)--Northwest, Pacific.

Takata, Hawayo Kawamuri, 1900-1980.

Takata, Hawayo Kawamuri.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (332 p.) : 15 b&w illustrations

Place of Publication:

Honolulu : University of Hawaii Press, [2023]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

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 Currents: Reiki's Circulation in the Twentieth-Century North Pacific analyzes how Takata, from her training in Japan in the mid-1930s to her death in Iowa in 1980, built a vast trans-Pacific network that connected Japanese American laborers on Hawai'i plantations 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, this book 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.

Contents:

Seeds of a Transpacific Network: A Young Woman on Kauaʻi,1900-1930

Drawn into the Current: Encountering Usui Reiki Therapy's Japanese Circulation, 1922-1937

Healing at the Hub of the Transwar Pacific: Adapting Reiki for Nikkei Hawaiʻi, 1937-1960

Building Authority in the Cold War United States: Networks, Esotericism, and Alterity in White America, 1948-1972

Coupling Universalism and "Japanese" Values: Making North American Masters, 1972-1980.

Notes:

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 01. Nov 2023)

ISBN:

0-8248-9640-8