This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Mikao Usui was born on August 15, 1865, in the mountain village of Taniai in Gifu Prefecture, and by his forties had already worked as a civil servant, a businessman and a lay Buddhist practitioner without settling on the vocation that held him. Around 1922, after a period of fasting and meditation, accounts place him on a twenty one day retreat on Mount Kurama, a mountain northeast of Kyoto with a long history as a site of Buddhist and mountain ascetic practice. He returned describing a method of hands on healing he called Reiki, universal life energy, and in April of that year he settled in the Harajuku district of Tokyo and founded the Usui Reiki Ryoho Gakkai, a society through which he began teaching it formally.
Usui taught for only four years before his death on March 9, 1926, in Fukuyama, but in that short span trained more than two thousand students, eleven of whom reached the highest teaching level, Shinpiden. One of them, Chujiro Hayashi, a former Imperial Japanese Navy officer, went on to develop a more clinical, fixed position form of the practice at his own Tokyo clinic. It was there that Hawayo Takata, a Japanese American widow visiting from Hawaii, was treated and later trained, carrying the practice west after Usui's own short span of direct teaching had already closed.