This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Hawayo Takata was born on December 24, 1900, in Hanamaulu on the island of Kauai, the daughter of Japanese immigrant plantation workers. She married, raised a family in Hawaii, and was widowed young; by the mid-1930s she was in poor health and grieving, and travelled to Japan both to settle a family matter and to seek treatment. There she was directed to a Reiki clinic in Tokyo run by Chujiro Hayashi, one of Mikao Usui's most senior students, where treatment for her own condition led her to ask to train in the method herself.
Hayashi accepted her, an unusual step for a Japanese American woman seeking entry to an inward facing Japanese teaching lineage, and she trained at his clinic through the mid to late 1930s, eventually being recognized as a Reiki Master. She returned to Hawaii before the outbreak of the Pacific War and opened a Reiki practice there, the first outside Japan, working quietly through the following decades. Only from the 1970s, in the last years of her life, did she begin training a first generation of Reiki Masters on the American mainland; she died on December 11, 1980, in Keosauqua, Iowa, but by then had set in motion the lineage nearly every Western Reiki teacher today can trace back to her own training in Hayashi's Tokyo clinic.