They say "time heals all wounds," but sometimes it simply negates a previous concern certain people had. We can see this in the case of traditional Reiki knowledge.

In January 1996 the public Internet was still in its infancy when my wife and I decided to give it a try. One of the first things I did was search for Reiki sites. I found a Reiki list called alt.healing.reiki where the first person I met was Walter Quan, who lives in nearby Victoria, BC. (Hi Walter.) After a time I asked on the list if anyone knew if old Reiki teaching was still carried on in Japan. The few who replied talked about Western Reiki being taught there but no one knew of any traditional schools.

Not long afterwards I received a private email from Dave King who explained some of his experiences in Japan with people connected to the original Reiki society and it's original members (like Dr. Hayashi and Toshihiro Eguchi.) Dave shared his experiences in small pieces (and continues to do so), and usually only if asked the right question. Eventually I learned that part of the reason for this was his loyalty and dedication to his Japanese teachers, and part was due to their wishes not to have their existence revealed to the Western world just yet (these were people in their 90's). Later it was also because some Reiki people would verbally attack him for revealing what they thought were Reiki lies (Arjava Petter told me he faced he same kind of scepticism and even threats when he published "Reiki Fire" in Germany in 1997. This strange interpretation of Usui's principles continues today among those who cannot accept that non-Japanese people actually made contact with Usui students.) But one person who did permit Dave to share information was Mr. Toshitaka Mochizuki, head of the Vortex Reiki school in Tokyo, possibly because in 1995 he had published his own revealing book on Reiki and some of it's history called "Iyashi No Te" .

Mochizuki-san is also associated with psychology training and each year he brings a group of Japanese to a retreat in a small town in British Columbia (BC) Canada to work with UBC professor C. Moon. He met with Dave here one year and invited him to come visit his school when in Japan. Dave did so in 1995 and stayed with the family of some of the English speaking teachers of the school, including Ms. A. Sato, a student of a Mr. Takahashi. Takahashi-san is a senior teacher at Vortex and also a member of the URR Gakkai. Sato-san gave her Reiki lineage as Usui-Eguchi-Miyazaki-Mitsui-Takahashi-Sato. The Mitsui seemed to be the Barbara Ray student who was allowed to teach only Reiki 1 and 2 in Japan in the early 1990's (both Mr. H. Doi and Mr. Takahashi were her students). A few years later I learned that Takahashi-san and Mochizuki-san actually received their Reiki Master training in 1993 from Arjava Petter, but do not mention him in their lineage. So here was a good example of Japanese listing their Reiki energy lineage, not their master-to-master lineage (a practice also followed by Mr. Doi , Ms. Y. Yamaguchi and Rev. Hyakuten Inamoto).

Dave suggested we try to bring Sato-san to Vancouver but sadly in 1996 there was not enough interest to achieve this. However, while this project was underway in June, I received an email from a Japanese ESL student new to Vancouver, S. Aoyama (interesting note: Aoyama is the district now in Tokyo where Usui lived in 1923.) I asked Aoyama-san how he had discovered me as his knowledge of English was very limited.. He said he had purchased Mochizuki's Reiki book ("Iyashino Te") before he boarded his flight to Vancouver. He found the idea of Reiki so interesting that when he arrived he wrote back to Mochizuki-san asking where he could find Reiki training in Vancouver. Mochizuki-san then mailed him a copy of my ad from Common Ground magazine. (I was very surprised he had this.)

When the class for Ms. Sato failed, Dave King offered to come to Vancouver to teach my friends and me an upgrade class to his Traditional Japanese Reiki system. When he arrived, he was surprised to discover that my friend E. Arai had translated some of Mochizuki's book. Dave wasn't aware the book had actually been published (his copy was a worn out one from Mochizuki). I suggested that perhaps he and Arai-san could collaborate on an English translation for Mochizuki. When Dave taught us his TJR system, at the time he was still using the Mochizuki attunement that Sato-san taught him, but was also sharing other old traditional Reiki information. A few years later I learned that this attunement originated with Arjava Petter (who learned it from his brother in Germany) and was even being used by Mr. Doi (Doi gave Petter credit for this at URRI 1999) although he had changed it somewhat.

In August 1996 Dave discovered that two of his TJR students tried to get more information about original Reiki methods from Mochizuki by threatening to share all Dave's "Mochizuki" information on the open Internet. They had already talked openly about Hatsurei-ho on alt.healing.reiki. Since this list was also watched by some URR Gakkai members, Mochizuki-san was told to stop teaching this meditation and to teach no more foreigners. Mochizuki also asked Dave to stop teaching the Vortex attunement method, and when asked about the book translation project, Mochizuki declined to do this with Dave.

Dave wrote me that he was upset about all this and so I asked if he had learned an attunement method from the senior Hayashi student he met in 1995 and 1996 named Tatsumi. Dave promptly shared a much shorter attunement he had been shown (a pre-1931 Hayashi method) and this became the new TJR attunement. I demonstrated this at URRI 1999 to a large group of Western Reiki Masters. In 2000 in Kyoto I also showed this to Rev. Inamoto and Yamaguchi-san's son, Tadao. Inamoto-san said it was very similar to what he had learned.

Also at URRI 1999 I had everyone try out the very short version of the Hayashi attunement that involved only the front hand position. (My friends call this "Rick-ju."  ) Everyone was surprised that this actually worked with any energy. I recall Light and A. Agee testing it for Karuna Reiki attunements. What surprised me even more was that the day before Doi-san had used a similar process on me in the hotel lobby. It was something that he later said had just come to him one day.

Meanwhile, back in 1996 after Mochizuki-san had given Dave the bad news, he phoned me before his flight back to Japan. I don't think he realised I had taken Dave's TJR training but in any case he seemed to want me to become involved with him and his school. I had difficulty understanding him so I asked that he fax me any information (he never did.) At the airport he met with Arai-san and asked her to do the translation of his book without Dave. Having lived in Canada for several decades, she didn't appreciate his attitude - mainly the fact that he felt some things were only for Japanese, so she declined the offer. It wasn't until 1999 when my friends and I translated Mr. Doi's book that we would finally get a complete look at a traditional Japanese Reiki oriented publication.

It's funny that after all this time, none of this really matters anymore. Doi-san came to Canada in 1999 and 2002 and shared much of his URR Gakkai knowledge (including Hatsurei-ho), all with the blessing of his URR Gakkai teacher, Koyama-sensei. We got his book published the following year, although it is now out of print. Mochizuki-san still seems to greet foreigners warmly who visit his Vortex school. Dave King decided to return to his original Usui training roots (learned in 1971 from Eguchi student Mr. Yuji Onuki) and no longer teaches a Reiki system. And original Reiki history and concepts continue to drop into my lap unexpectedly. 

So again, more Reiki coincidences. And in the end, all the concern about secrecy melted away. I think Usui Sensei would be happy (but confused about the Western mind.)