Usui Reiki Ryoho Gakkai: History, Structure and Role

The Usui Reiki Ryoho Gakkai is a Japanese Reiki society associated with Mikao Usui and the teaching he developed in the 1920s. In English it is usually rendered as the Usui Reiki Healing Method Society or Usui Reiki Healing Method Learning Society. It is not a worldwide church, a licensing body or the final authority on every form of Reiki. Older accounts describe it as a small, private society with its own history, manuals and ways of practising; its current size and public status are not established by those accounts.

That distinction matters because a great deal of Western Reiki writing presents the Gakkai either as the hidden source of a pure original system or as a mysterious group that vanished after the Second World War. Neither picture is quite right. The society was formed around Usui's work, but its formal shape came together as his students responded to his death. Its practices are documented in Japanese manuals and in accounts by members and researchers, yet those sources are partial and not always consistent.

This page looks at what can reasonably be said about the Gakkai: its origins, its presidents, the kind of practice reported inside it, and its relationship to the lineages that carried Reiki to the West. For the wider story, see the Reiki history overview.

What the Usui Reiki Ryoho Gakkai is

The name has three parts. Usui refers to Mikao Usui. Reiki Ryoho means Reiki healing method or Reiki treatment method. Gakkai means society or study association. The name describes a society for studying and practising Usui's healing method, not a religion or a certification board.

According to the account most often repeated in English, Usui moved to Tokyo in April 1922 and established an institute in Harajuku, Aoyama, where he taught and gave treatments. In February 1925 he moved to a larger training centre in Nakano. After his death in March 1926, senior students kept the centre going and organised the society around it. Some accounts date the Gakkai itself to 1922; others say it was formally established in 1926 or 1927 by Rear Admiral Jūzaburō Ushida and other students. The disagreement is partly a question of what counts as the founding: Usui's teaching institute, or the membership society that continued after him.

The 1927 Mikao Usui memorial stone at Saihōji Temple is an important witness to the first stage. It records that more than two thousand pupils learned from Usui and that senior students in Tokyo were maintaining his training centre. It does not describe a corporate structure, a board or a grand master.

How the society formed after Usui's death

Usui's death left no publicly documented successor with the title of grand master. The memorial was erected by students, and the society that continued his work was organised by senior practitioners. In the standard Western account, Ushida, a naval officer and Shihan, became the first president after Usui and is sometimes counted as the second if Usui is honoured posthumously as the first.

A useful way to read the early Gakkai is as a preservation society. Its members had received a specific training from Usui, they had his precepts and techniques, and they wanted to keep the practice intact. Their solution was a closed membership with a president, regional branches and a shared body of manuals. That structure helped the teaching survive, but it also made the Gakkai inward-looking, especially in the decades after the war.

The society is reported to have had more than eighty branches at one time. By the early 2000s, James Deacon's account described only five branches with a combined membership of roughly five hundred people, of whom a small number held the Shinpiden level. Those figures are dated and should be treated as a snapshot, not a current census. No current public membership report or directory was located; older accounts describe membership as by invitation.

Presidents and the question of succession

The usual list of presidents runs from Ushida through a small sequence of senior teachers to Masayoshi Kondō, who is generally said to have taken office in the late 1990s. Spelling and dates vary between sources, and some accounts count Usui himself as the first president.

Order	President	Notes
1 (or 2)	Jūzaburō Ushida	Led the society from 1926 until his death in 1935; associated with the 1927 memorial
2 (or 3)	Kan'ichi Taketomi	Also romanised as Ilichi Taketomi; presidency dates not consistently published
3 (or 4)	Yoshiharu Watanabe	Presidency dates not consistently published
4 (or 5)	Toyoichi Wanami	Also written Hoichi Wanami; associated with the society's manual tradition
5 (or 6)	Kimiko Koyama	Associated with the 1970s Hikkei compilation
6 (or 7)	Masayoshi Kondō	Generally said to have taken office in 1998 or 1999

The important point is not the exact sequence of offices. It is that the Gakkai's leadership model is a presidency, not a universal spiritual monarchy. The idea of a single "lineage bearer" or "Grand Master" who speaks for all Reiki came from the Western Usui Shiki Ryoho organisations, not from the Gakkai. Even within the Takata lineage, the title is contested; Carol Farmer, a master initiated by Phyllis Furumoto, wrote a first-person account disputing the idea that one person could be the sole heir to the system. The Reiki Alliance, for its part, uses the language of lineage and grandmaster for its own structure, which is a separate institutional history.

What members practise

Descriptions of Gakkai practice come mainly from Japanese members who spoke to Western researchers, from manuals such as the Reiki Ryoho Hikkei and Reiki Ryoho no Shiori, and from Hiroshi Doi, who has described himself as a member. They should be read as reports about a private tradition rather than as a published syllabus.

Reported elements include:

Shuyō kai — regular meetings for practice and study, rather than the weekend certification classes common in the West.
Gokai — the five precepts, chanted morning and evening. The memorial's version begins "Do not get angry today"; the familiar Western wording, "Just for today, do not anger," is Takata's later translation.
Hatsurei ho — a set of preparatory practices combining breathing, visualisation and light meditation.
Byōsen — scanning with the hands to feel areas of heat, coolness, pain or congestion.
Reiju — the initiation or empowerment that connects a student to the practice. This is the Japanese term; it is not identical in form to the Western attunement.
Gyosei — waka poetry written by the Meiji Emperor, which members chant as part of practice.
Hands-on practice — including standard positions and intuitive placement, with attention to the whole body rather than a single region.

The society's manuals also include the Ryōhō Shishin, an early reference matching hand placements to body regions. It records historical teaching rather than validated clinical guidance.

The Hikkei and the Shiori

Two texts are closely associated with the Gakkai. The Reiki Ryoho Hikkei, sometimes translated as the Reiki Treatment Companion, is a manual said to have been given to Shoden students. It is usually described as a 68-page compilation containing an introduction, a question-and-answer section, the Ryōhō Shishin and Meiji poetry. The Q&A is written in the voice of Usui but was compiled long after his death, in the 1970s, under Kimiko Koyama. The English text most often shared online is James Deacon's translation of the Q&A section only; it is a secondary translation, not a facsimile of the whole manual.

The Reiki Ryoho no Shiori, or Guide to Reiki Ryoho, is a separate booklet associated with Koyama and Wanami. It covers the society's history and administration, its understanding of Reiki, the precepts, and techniques such as byōsen and nentatsu hō. The existence of these manuals is well attested. Their exact contents and wording are harder to verify because the Japanese originals have not been published in a critical edition.

Why the society became secretive

A later Reiki-lineage explanation holds that the Gakkai withdrew after 1945 because of a licensing requirement. The account repeated by the International Center for Reiki Training says that "rumors were passed about healing that required one to have a massage or medical license to practice Reiki," and that the Gakkai chose secrecy rather than conform. That is a report of what practitioners were told, not a legal record. The 2009 ICRT article introduces the claim in exactly those terms.

The Japanese statute commonly cited in this discussion is the 1947 Act on Anma, Acupuncture, Moxibustion and Judo Therapy. It licenses those named practices and, in Article 12, prohibits other "medical-similar acts" as a business. It does not name Reiki. Whether Reiki was treated as a covered practice, and whether the law motivated the Gakkai's privacy, are not established by the statute or by the Reiki accounts available here. The legal claim should therefore be attributed to the lineage story, not presented as a proven requirement. The statute text is public, but it does not settle the application.

What is better documented is the effect: the Gakkai became inward-looking, members practised mainly among themselves, and Western practitioners lost contact with Japanese Reiki until researchers such as Mieko Mitsui renewed it in the 1980s. The withdrawal, whatever its causes, protected the tradition but reduced its public presence.

Relationship to Hayashi, Takata and Western Reiki

Chujiro Hayashi studied with Usui in 1925, was authorised as a Shihan, and later ran his own clinic and research association in Tokyo. He is generally said to have left the Gakkai around 1931, and his system developed its own emphasis on clinical practice and standardised hand positions. Hayashi is therefore part of the Gakkai's early history but not simply its continuation.

Hawayo Takata studied at Hayashi's clinic in the mid-1930s and carried his teaching to Hawaii. She was not a Gakkai member, and the system she taught became Usui Shiki Ryoho in the West. The Gakkai and the Takata lineage share a root in Usui, but they are different branches with different manuals, initiations and organisational cultures.

Japanese Reiki today is not limited to the Gakkai either. Jikiden Reiki, associated with Chiyoko Yamaguchi and her son Tadao, traces its teaching to Hayashi and emphasises an unbroken Japanese practice. Komyo Reiki Kai, Gendai Reiki Ho and other schools have their own approaches. The Gakkai is one important node in that network, not the whole network.

Common misunderstandings

"The Gakkai is the original Reiki church." It is a society formed around Usui's teaching, with a specific membership and presidency. It has no documented authority over Reiki outside Japan.

"The Gakkai has a grand master." Its leader is a president. The grandmaster title belongs to the Western Usui Shiki Ryoho structure and is disputed even there.

"The Gakkai preserved Usui's system unchanged." The society preserved a body of practice, but it also compiled manuals decades later, and its teaching has its own history. The Shoden, Okuden and Shinpiden structure is Japanese, but the way it is taught varies between lineages.

"Takata learned from the Gakkai." She learned from Hayashi, who had been part of Usui's circle and later organised his own association. That is a meaningful difference when tracing a lineage.

What the Gakkai can and cannot tell us about Reiki's origins

The Gakkai is valuable because it preserves Japanese terms, practices and texts that the Western lineage simplified or dropped. It is not a time capsule. Its manuals were compiled in the 1970s, its oral history has passed through several generations, and its members have their own interpretations. Used carefully, it is one of the best available windows into how Usui's teaching was understood in Japan. Used uncritically, it becomes another origin myth.

The most defensible position is the one the sources themselves support: Mikao Usui developed a healing and spiritual practice in Japan in the early 1920s; a society of his students preserved and organised it after his death; Hayashi and Takata developed a related but distinct Western lineage; and the relationships among those branches are historical and human, not a single unbroken chain of command.

Frequently asked questions

Is the Usui Reiki Ryoho Gakkai still active?

Older accounts and later researchers describe it as active, but no current public membership figures or directory were located. Present-day size and activity should therefore be treated as unverified.

Can anyone join the Gakkai?

Older accounts describe membership as invitation-only, and it is not a commercial certification route. Someone seeking Reiki training in the West should look at the teacher and the course rather than assuming Gakkai membership is available or necessary.

Is Gakkai Reiki different from the Reiki I can learn today?

The underlying practice shares the precepts, hands-on treatment and initiations, but the Gakkai's Japanese techniques and manuals differ from the standard Western curriculum. Some Western teachers have incorporated Japanese techniques; many have not.

Did the Gakkai authorise Hawayo Takata?

There is no evidence that it did. Takata trained with Hayashi, and her authorisation came through him. The memorial stone and the society's later history are separate from her line.

Does the Gakkai have a website or public headquarters?

No authoritative current English-language site or public headquarters information was located. Older accounts describe a private society whose details circulate through researchers, practitioners and Japanese members rather than an official global site.