Master Maeda was born and lives in Japan, where he founded many schools to spread the discipline called Waraku that he created for the pursuit of internal peace and peace with other people. Doing so he was also inspired by life and deeds of San Francesco, that much impressed him, and the first time when he travelled to Europe he visited the La Verna shrine where San Francesco used to practice meditation. He is a member of the Oomoto Shinto community, founded on the principles of a life in phisical and spiritual harmony with other people, that can be summarized as follows: purity, purification of mind and body; optimism, believing in the goodness of the divine will; progressivism, way of social improvement; unification, the reconciliation of all dichotomies. Pursuing these principles, Oomoto fosters the diffusion of esperanto as a means to bring peoples together and looks forward to opportunities of communion with different religions. Master Maeda started as he was very young to study traditional Japanese techniques and philosophy and as a boy he started practicing Karate, a discipline that he already mastered at the end of high school and in which he took part with success at the national championships. Afterwords a few events of his life made him feel that there was something more to search. In the 80’s he deepened his studies in Oomoto center in Kameoka, and he then developed his techniques that have become Waraku, a discipline based on the Japanese tradition of Budo, a practice that uses the body as a means to come nearer to God, to the universe or what else constitutes an ideal for a person.

The name Waraku has two meanings. The most common meaning is peace and goodness forever. Waraku brings mental, physical and emotional balance to the individual as well as their surroundings. The other meaning is circle, spiral and intersection. The movement of energy in Waraku is based on the shape of the spiral, a very powerful shape found everywhere in nature from the double helix of DNA, to whirlpools and typhoons, to black holes and galaxies. This shape is powerful because it starts from a core point and spirals out, making overlapping circles which do not lose momentum and energy like only one circle would, the energy and momentum is carried and multiplied. Waraku is founded on the concept that every person has a core, like a spirit or a soul, with four basic attributes or feelings: happy, peaceful, powerful and miraculous. People who practice Waraku try to improve themselves and help others to improve themselves as well, by awakening both their physical and emotional energy.