Usui Tei: New Findings on the Wife of Usui Mikao Sensei
November 5, 2026
A Timeline · 1865 – 1946
Two Lives, One Household
Usui Mikao and Usui Tei, side by side
What the Taiwan archives now tell us about Usui Mikao Sensei and his wife, Usui Tei, laid out year by year: from his 1904 CV and her personnel files of 1905 to 1922.
Born 15 August in Taniai, Gifu.
1865
1880
Born 13 January as Suzuki Tei in Inba District, Chiba.
Studies psychology under Motora Yūjirō in Tokyo, then psychology and philosophy in America (1895–96).
1893
Known as Suzuki Mikao. The official gazette uses the name in December, while he is in America. He uses it until 1903. Probably unrelated to Tei’s family: Suzuki is one of the most common names in Japan. Hopefully one day we will find out why.
1896
Runs the Kion school (喜音) in Fukagawa, Tokyo, for the Methodist Women’s Foreign Missionary Society (1899–1903).
1899
Graduates from Aoyama Jogakuin, the girls’ school of the same missionary society.
1900
Sewing teacher’s licence. Head teacher at a sewing teachers’ training school in Fukagawa, the district of the Kion school (1900–01). Then Nara, and Sennan Girls’ High School near Osaka (1902).
1899 – 1902Likely meeting. Both are working in Fukagawa within the same Methodist mission: he at the Kion school, she at a sewing teachers’ school in the same district. Before this he was in America (1895–98) and she was still a schoolgirl.
August: hired in Taipei for the Old Customs Research Committee under Gotō Shinpei. His handwritten CV gives his address as Fukagawa, Nishimoto-machi No. 1.
1904
1905
Signs a CV as “Usui Tei”, former name Suzuki, family register Fukagawa, Nishimoto-machi No. 1. Appointed 3 May to the Japanese Language School in Taipei.
1908 · 1914Son Fuji (不二) and daughter Toshiko (敏子) are born, during Tei’s years of service in Taiwan.
1909
Teaches at the new girls’ high school in Taipei; four times on the teachers’ examination committee (1912–17).
15 December: Okamatsu Santarō, his mentor from Taiwan, dies.
1921
Seriously ill. Diagnosed 1 May with neurasthenia and beriberi; the doctor records treating her with seishin ryōhō (精神療法) alongside medicine. Retires 24 May after sixteen years.
April 1922Mount Kurama. Usui Sensei treats himself, then his household (家人), then founds the Usui Reiki Ryōhō Gakkai in Harajuku, where Tei is recorded living that same month. In September he publishes the Kōkai Denju Setsumeisho, declaring he will not keep the method within his family.
Dies 9 March in Fukuyama. Memorial stone raised at Saihōji, 1927. His Buddhist name: 霊山院秀譽天心居士.
1926
Widowed at 46, with Fuji (17) and Toshiko (11). Supported by her own pension.
1935
Toshiko dies, aged only 21.
1946
Loses Fuji on 10 July. Dies 17 October, having outlived her husband by twenty years and both her children. Her Buddhist name: 貞心院温譽浄忍大姉.
A shared nameBoth rest in the family grave at Saihōji, a Jōdo-shū temple since the early 1600s, and both posthumous names are Jōdo-shū (Pure Land) names, marked by the same 譽: his Reizan-in Shūyo Tenshin Koji, “of the Heavenly Heart”; hers Teishin’in On’yo Jōnin Daishi, “of the Steadfast Heart.”
Bronwen Logan
Bronwen LoganI have been practising and teaching the system of Reiki since 1999. Reiki with Bronwen, which I founded, is home for everything I do now: Shinpiden+, my online programme for serious practitioners and teachers; the Shūyō app for daily practice; and the Reiki Women Podcast, which I co-founded. I have co-written a handful of books along the way, including The Reiki Sourcebook, The Japanese Art of Reiki and Your Reiki Treatment, and before all this I helped build the International House of Reiki. Most of my study has gone into the Japanese roots of the system, and that is where my teaching comes from. Outside that: writing, animals, and new books on the way.
