Usui and the Chiba Clan

It has been sometime since I have been able to put a post up on here. A major PC crash and resultant total rebuild of my system along with some major irritations and problems over getting my main website up and running have gobbled up big chunks of my time over the past four months or so. Life at break-neck speed seems to have become the norm recently and this has not left me with the time to engage in the more frivolous activities of being a writer such as keeping up with an ongoing weblog. Odd to find myself today then, having just put the finishing touches to the last page of my website with time on my hands. Having done the requisite slobbing about in the garden, walking into town and having a coffee for no other reason than to make a point of idling away some time and then wandering aimlessly for a while, I find myself back here. At the PC with things that need to be said.

There is one thing that has bothered me for a while over the history of Reiki. It is not something that comes up in my book as I haven’t researched it that deeply, but there appears to be an anomaly over one aspect of the story of Mikao Usui. Any comments from those that would know the answer to this conundrum would be very gratefully received by the way.

According to many commentators on the history of Reiki, Usui was descended from the Chiba clan – a family of noble Samurai with many significant ancestors that helped to shape Japan over the centuries. Hiroshi Doi (the Japanese Reiki Master who is a member of the Usui Reiki Ryoho Gakkai) and others have confirmed this and it apparently states on the Usui memorial stone that this is the case. It could of course be that the confirmation from Doi and the others is precisely due to the statement on the memorial stone and that they have no other sources – most likely. However, there seems to be no reason to doubt the memorial stone inscription apart from the fact that it appears as if this statement is not congruent with the actual Samurai crest that also appears on the memorial.

It is curious to find on the Samurai Archive website that the crest for the Chiba clan is not that which appears on the Usui memorial but the crest given here.

According to the Samurai Archive – an extensive and very authoritative resource on pretty much every aspect of Samurai history – the crest that appears on the Usui memorial, shown here, in fact belongs to the Obu clan.

This is confirmed by other authoritative Samurai history sources. If we take these sources as being accurate it would seem that Usui was in fact born into the Obu clan and not the Chiba clan. This makes not a jot of difference of course to the resultant emergence of Usui’s Reiki system, but it is important to address historical anomalies as they occur and this certainly seems to be one of them.

In my book ‘Reiki Jin Kei Do: The Way of Compassion and Wisdom’ I have stuck with the generally accepted view that Usui was descended from the Chiba clan. There do seem to be reasonably authoritative sources on this such as Andy Bowling’s excellent piece on the Ancestry of Usui Sensei but there does seem to be a conflict between the statement on Usui’s memorial stone and the presence of the Obu clan crest also on the memorial. How does this square then with the image given on Andy Bowling’s site that translates (according to Bowling) as “Chiba Shizoku - The Chiba Clan” and which shows the Obu clan crest?

What is interesting regarding the importance of the clan crest and the status of Samurai during the period that encompassed Usui’s life is detailed here from the weblog by Rain:

In 19th century, even the status of a samurai could be bought from the Tokugawa shogunate or its ally Matsudaira. This was imitated by other impoverished warlords all over Japan. One of the most shocking example is the samurai status of the man who kicked Japan into ‘modernisation’: Ito Hirobumi. His daddy, a merchant, bought the status. In such a world, then, naturally everyone could have a crest for real.

A greater wave was to come under the reign of Emperor Meiji (1868-1912). His Majesty abolished the warrior class – and outlawed the samuraihood as defined by the previous eras. Samurai or not was to make no distinction, or so Meiji and his advisors naively
thought; their ambition was to be as Americanized as possible a.s.a.p.

Emperor Meiji ordered every Japanese to get his or her family name registered.

Such a simple order caused a major upheaval in Japan, because (I didn’t mention it before because I thought everybody knows that) since Year 1 until 1868 only the samurai was allowed to have family names. Other people could only have one individual name each.

In the last years of the Tokugawa shogunate, merchants adopted some sort of family names already, but it wasn’t a nationwide policy.

Now imagine the millions of Japanese who must find a family name each, while the stern and impatient Meiji officials already started filing the names up. Some could tap some historical sources, some others had exerted their imagination since long ago, but the majority simply scrambled upon any name that crossed their minds. That’s why you will always find many Japanese sharing the exact same last name (even when written in kanji) but there’s no familial relation at all among them.

With the advent of family names for everybody, crests, as a matter of course, multiplied overnight. In 2006, there are more or less 8,000 family crests in Japan (or some say between 6,000 and 7,000).

So clearly there was and is great confusion over the issue of Japanese family names. In Usui’s time there was a mad scramble for a name to give a family status that perhaps it did not historically deserve. There could even be confusion over which crest belonged to which family. Given this are we really sure that Usui was descended from the Samurai? If he was, are we sure which family he was actually descended from?

I would be interested to hear from anyone with expertise in this area that might be able to bring some clarity to this issue. Chiba or Obu or perhaps neither? Which is it?

Another good resource for anyone interested in the Samurai can be found at: Kazenaga