Reiki: The Transmigration of a Japanese Spiritual Healing

The author reconstructs the spirituality of a Japanese spiritual healing practice of the 1920s, Reiki, and places this in the Japanese socio-cultural context. Next he describes the development of this spirituality during its migration to North America (1930s) and eventually to the Netherlands (1980s).He argues that many elements of a spirituality belong to the practitioners' natural habitat and do not migrate with a given practice to other places with different socio-cultural backgrounds, and consequently the spirituality changes. Surprisingly enough, Western esoteric traditions influenced both the inception of Reiki in Japan and the spread of Reiki in the West.This study places Reiki in context and contributes to academic knowledge about spiritual practices as well as to the insight of changes in the field of religions, spiritual practices and world views.