Thursday, May 7, 2009

Reiki Ryoho

While some sources maintain that the Usui Reiki Ryoho Gakkai (Usui Reiki Healing Method Learning Society) was founded by Usui-Sensei himself in 1922, it is generally accepted that the Gakkai was actually founded by Rear Admiral Juusaburo Gyuda (Ushida) and other students around 1926/7.

It is also said that they posthumously honoured Usui-Sensei by naming him as the first kaicho (president / chairman) of the society, Ushida himself being classed as the second.

Prior to the Japanese entering W.W.II, Hayashi-Sensei had committed suicide, and with Takata-Sensei returning home once more to Hawaii, all contact between Japanese Reiki practitioners and the West was, it seems, lost.

[Well almost all - fourteen years after Hayashi-sensei's death, Takata-Sensei made a return visit to Japan and met with his wife,Chie, who was also a Reiki master.]

Certainly, in later years, it seems to have been the general consensus amongst Usui Shiki Ryoho practitioners that the practice of Reiki had eventually died out in Japan, and that, (up to 1976 when she began initiating masters) Takata-sensei was the only living Reiki Master on the planet.

However, as journalist and "Radiance Technique" Reiki practitioner Mieko Mitsui was to discover on returning to Japan in 1985 to research the origins of Reiki, this was not the case.

Not only was Reiki alive and well, but so, it seemed, was the Usui Reiki Ryoho Gakkai.

[Though it has been suggested that the current Gakkai (if in fact it exists at all) might actually be a recently 'restablished' society - in much the same way that, in the West, long-defunct esoteric orders have been re-established by those with no direct connection to the originals]

The current president of the Gakkai is said to be a Mr. Masayoshi (or Masaki) Kondo.

Between Ushida (who held the office from 1926 to his death in 1935) and Kondo (1999 to date) there have apparently been four other presidents:
Kanichi Taketomi; Yoshiharu Watanabe; Hoichi Wanami; and Kimiko Koyama.

At one time there were supposedly more than 80 branches of the Gakkai, though at present there are only 5, with a combined membership in the region of 500 people, only 12 of which are of Shinpiden level.

According to Hiroshi Doi [who claims to be a member of the Gakkai] at the Gakkai's headquarters in Tokyo, weekly meetings referred to as shuyo kai are held, during which the students chant the gokai (the Reiki Precepts), practice the Hatsurei-ho and sing Gyosei - poetry penned by the Emperor Meiji. [These poems are in a style known as waka, ('Japanese Song') - short poems with lines containing fixed numbers of syllables. The familiar Zen haikyu are a form of waka]