Bookshelf

Alumni and faculty members who would like to have their books considered for this listing should contact Stacey Himmelberger, editor of Hamilton magazine. This list, which dates back to 2018, is updated periodically with books appearing alphabetically on the date of entry.

Alternate Currents: Reiki’s Circulation in the Twentieth-Century North Pacific by Justin B. Stein ’01

November 8, 2023

Tags Alumni Book

(Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2023).

In the second half of the 20th century, Reiki went from an obscure therapy known to a few thousand Japanese and Japanese Americans to a global phenomenon. Practitioners channel a cosmic energy - known as Reiki - to heal body, mind, and spirit. Credited with spearheading the international rise and development of Reiki is Hawayo Takata (1900–80), a Hawai‘i-born Japanese American woman who adapted it for thousands of students in Hawai‘i and North America. According to the publisher, this book “analyzes how, from her training in Japan in the mid-1930s to her death in Iowa in 1980, Takata built a vast trans-Pacific network that connected Japanese American laborers on plantations in Hawai‘i to social elites in Tokyo, Hollywood, and New York; middle-class housewives in American suburbs; and off-the-grid tree planters in the mountains of British Columbia. Using recently uncovered archival materials and original oral histories, Justin B. Stein examines how these relationships between healer and patient, master and disciple, became deeply infused with values of their time and place and how they interplayed with Reiki’s circulation, performance, and meanings along with broader cultural shifts in the 20th-century North Pacific.” The author is chair of Asian studies at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in British Columbia.