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Chujiro Hayashi, second master in the usui lineage, was born on September 15, 1880, into a family of material possessions and social influence.

A doctor and commander of the Imperial Japanese Navy, he met Mikao Usui while attending one of his conferences. After this event, he learned Reiki from Usui and became one of his most devoted disciples. He graduated from Reiki in 1925, having been one of the 17 masters that Usui trained from among his more than 2000 students. In his clinic, located in Shinanomachi, he began to include Reiki as a form of treatment having been from Hayashi, that Reiki patients began to be treated on stretchers or marchioness, and no longer in chairs as happened until then with Usui.

In treating patients on stretchers, they started to rely on 2 Reiki therapists simultaneously, with 10 stretchers available at hayashi’s clinic, which began to assume an increasing relevance in the area of physical disease cures, beginning to emerge as an alternative to surgeries at that time since the risk of contagion by pathogens in these surgeries was great, since it was not until 1945 that penicillin would be discovered.

Because of his medical background, he began to use a more therapeutic approach to Reiki, with a greater focus on physical harm, while the way Reiki was taught by Usui was more spiritualized and mystical.

It was at his reiki clinic and school – the Hayashi Reiki Kenkyukai – that Hayashi would come to know the one he would later name as his successor – Hawayo Takata – that he sought out to take care of some health problems.

The Hayashi Reiki Kenkyukai acted with great success and took great notoriety and came to receive the visit of the Japanese emperor.

In 1937, Hayashi traveled to Hawaii, territory annexed by the U.S. in 1898, to teach The Reiki Master’s degree to Hawayo Takata, depositing in his disciple high hopes of broadening reiki’s knowledge in the West.

Upon returning in 1938, the Japanese military intercepted him and demanded military information about the location of U.S. strategic military points in Hawaii, with the purpose of the Japanese preparing a more effective attack on the U.S. to what Master Hayashi will refuse.

Given the rigidity of Japanese culture at that time, and to save the honor in a markedly nationalist country, it was left only to practice the seppuku consisting of a Japanese suicide ritual, traditionally reserved for samurai, which allows him to assume an honorable death. He performed the act on May 10, 1940, thus avoiding having to fight in World War II and take part in this cataclysmic episode in human history.

His hayashi reiki kenkyukai clinic was left in the care of his wife Chie Hayashi, 7 years his youngest, and with whom he had a son in 1903 and a daughter in 1910.

His wife was one of 13 Reiki masters that Hayashi formed, among them Chiyoko Yamaguchi and Hawayo Takata who would open his own Reiki clinic in Hawaii and graduate as a master in 1937.

Hayashi’s legacy to Reiki was immense in the sense that it helped systematize his teaching and brought him closer to a more pragmatic understanding of medicine.