Omoto: The Spiritual Current Under State Shinto

It began in 1892, when a woman named Nao Deguchi (1837–1918) was seized by kamigakari, or divine possession. Proclaiming the "remaking and renewal of the world," she began producing automatic writings known as fudesaki (筆先)—script set down as the kami took hold of her brush.

The fudesaki continued for roughly twenty-six years until her death in 1918, eventually amounting to an astonishing two hundred thousand sheets of traditional hanshi paper.

National Learning was born as a strong reaction to this hardening, unified system.

The trend went on for some time, and then a being that can be called the summation of the new-religion movements arose from a village ringed by mountains in Tamba. This is the source of Omoto.

When Nao, the spiritual presence of the age, and Onisaburo crossed paths, a movement quite unlike the State Shinto of the center began to stir in the mountains of Tamba.

Viewing the rapidly ballooning movement as a threat, the government mobilized roughly two hundred police officers in the early morning hours of February 12, 1921, to raid the headquarters in Ayabe, arresting Onisaburo Deguchi and other senior figures on charges that included lese-majesty against the Imperial House and the imperial lineage.

I see the period around 1921 as the moment when Omoto became an entirely different religious body, and that is the crucial turning point.

Under an atmosphere of mounting tension between the bloated religious organization and the military, before dawn on December 8, 1935, five hundred armed police officers launched a simultaneous raid on the Omoto headquarters in Ayabe and Kameoka, arresting Onisaburo, senior leaders, and believers on charges of violating the Peace Preservation Law and lese-majesty. This was the Second Omoto Incident.

By the time of the second suppression, when the military had acquired overwhelming authority, Omoto was subjected to crushing force—its facilities blown up with dynamite, its publications banned—yet even before that blow fell, Omoto no longer possessed the strength to survive into the next age.

The reason was that after the first crackdown, its key figures had already left the organization en masse.

In truth, this split within Omoto gave rise to a lineage that would exert a profound influence on Japanese society before, during, and after the war—an influence that endures to this very day.

For that reason the government of the time suspected it of plotting to overthrow it, and it suffered two great crackdowns, in 1921 and 1935.

Later he stressed again and again that "the root of aikido lies in the kotodama of ancient times."

Remarkably, these texts contained not a single Chinese character, composed entirely in phonetic hiragana. Many of the writings were prophetic. In particular, her foretelling of the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) caused her words to be received as an urgent divine warning.

Through Nao's mysterious powers, the sick were healed and miracles were reported in rapid succession. Word of Nao Deguchi of Ayabe traveled quickly from province to province, drawing a devoted following.

Born to a farming household in Kameoka, south of Ayabe, Kisaburo was a hotheaded, rebellious youth who was expelled from school, drifted through various occupations, and launched several commercial ventures that all ended in failure. It was only in 1896, at the age of twenty-six, that he finally achieved success with a dairy business. Until then, he had harbored virtually no interest in religion.

Around that time, however, the sudden death of his father, constant brawling, and the estrangement of his grandmother converged all at once. Resolved to break cleanly with his past, he determined to set out on the path of a religious seeker. In 1898, after encountering an ascetic possessing mysterious spiritual powers, he undertook a week of rigorous training on Mount Takakuma in Kameoka, where an intense mystical experience revealed to him his life's calling.

Convinced that he was destined to be a savior, Kisaburo handed his business to his younger brother and traveled across the country, seeking out various teachers to master Shinto spirituality. Through this quest he gained a deep grasp of the new Shinto tracing back to Atsutane Hirata, and soon began preaching in Sonobe, near Kameoka.

The following year, guided by divine summons, Kisaburo visited Nao Deguchi for the first time. He married one of her daughters, Sumiko Deguchi, and threw himself entirely into the expansion of Omoto. Taking the name Onisaburo Deguchi, he would grow into a charismatic figure who exerted a fierce and lasting influence across prewar Japan.

What must not be overlooked is that these movements—Kurozumikyo, Tenrikyo, Konkokyo, and Omotokyo—all arose not in Edo, Kyoto, or the major urban centers, but in isolated mountain villages and agrarian hinterlands.

An anti-urban faith. A spiritual movement conceived as an anti-mainstream force. This is one of the defining characteristics of Shinto in modern history. At the same time, this was an era in which Japan was compelled to hasten the creation of a modern nation-state capable of standing against the West. And so the new religions, born of a spiritual awakening, were inexorably forced into political consolidation under the aegis of the state.

Wasaburo Asano (1874–1937) was a scholar of English literature and a well-known intellectual of his day who served as an English instructor at the Imperial Japanese Naval Engineering School. His encounter with Omoto came in 1916, when a colleague, a former naval engineering commander, introduced him to the movement led by Nao Deguchi and Onisaburo Deguchi, and he found himself deeply moved by its mystical teachings. Drawn to Nao's prophecies and Onisaburo's charismatic leadership, Asano joined the faith, moved to the Omoto headquarters in Ayabe, Kyoto Prefecture, and devoted himself wholly to religious life.

Asano's conversion became the catalyst that transformed the character of Omoto. Having begun in the rural villages of the Tango region, Omoto had rarely attracted intellectuals of Asano's caliber, and a mind like his was precisely what the movement needed to grow. Onisaburo warmly welcomed a man of such intelligence and literary gift, accorded him special treatment, and before long singled him out to serve as president of the Dai Nippon Shusaikai, an Omoto missionary organization. Brought into the inner circle as the movement's theoretical pillar, Wasaburo Asano took on the vital role of providing a logical foundation for the "Taisho Restoration" that Onisaburo championed.

Asano's influence reached his own family as well, gradually reshaping the very foundations of Omoto. His elder brother, Masayasu Asano, was a prominent naval officer—then a rear admiral and later a vice admiral. Though Masayasu at first strongly opposed his younger brother's religious activities, he was eventually won over and joined Omoto at the end of 1916. Remarkable as it sounds, Masayasu stepped down from active duty in the Navy and moved to the sect's base in Ayabe. With the two brothers now joined together, Wasaburo served as president of the Dai Nippon Shusaikai while Masayasu served as an advisor, placing the Asano brothers at the very heart of the organization's leadership.

Because a naval officer with as bright a future as Masayasu Asano had made a decision radical enough to alter the course of his life, the name of Omoto began to spread among segments of the military. In short, it was Wasaburo Asano's entry and work that served as the detonator for Omoto's explosive growth. Alongside Onisaburo, Asano raised the banner of shinsei (神政)—governance by the gods—through a "Taisho Restoration," calling for the reconstruction of Japan on the basis of Nao Deguchi's prophecies. His lucid theoretical arguments appealed strongly to intellectuals and social leaders, steadily drawing a new stratum of believers into the fold.

To begin with, Omoto preached an interpretation at odds with the imperial mythology upheld by State Shinto, advancing rapidly on the strength of its own eschatology—above all the prophetic revelations delivered by Ushitora no Konjin, the deity who had possessed Nao Deguchi. The government consequently viewed it as a dangerous movement contrary to the national creed. The character of the Taisho era was deeply bound up with this: it was a time when Japanese readings of anarchism sparked both a surge of activism and fierce state repression, and not a few people took a reactive stand against the existing order. Omoto belonged to that same current, expressing in its very doctrine a position distinct from State Shinto and emperor worship.

This was what prompted the police to begin covert investigations of the sect around 1919 and ultimately hardened the government's resolve to launch the crackdown of early 1921. And when, in the aftermath of that incident, Onisaburo shifted course to accommodate State Shinto, a decisive rupture followed: the departure of key figure Wasaburo Asano. What lay behind Omoto's change of course has never been fully brought to light, yet as the trial dragged on through appeals to the higher courts, we cannot rule out the possibility of a backroom deal between the government and Onisaburo conditioned on the dropping of charges.

Especially after the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923—itself a major turning point on the road to the Second World War—Omoto cooperated with the Red Swastika Society in China, strengthening ties in a bid to internationalize its mission. Yet the times were shifting. The Taisho era, with its reactive spirit against the Meiji order, came to an end, and at the close of 1926 Japan plunged into the Showa era (1926–1989), when militarism rapidly gathered speed. As state control tightened, surveillance of the citizenry grew ever harsher, the suppression of speech became routine, and the political voice of the military—above all the Army—grew too powerful to ignore, eventually acquiring enough leverage to move the emperor himself. Acting on the Army's wishes, government authorities concluded that although Omoto outwardly professed reverence for the Imperial House and aligned itself with militarism, in reality it had "organized a society to abolish the emperor system and install Onisaburo as an absolute monarch." Omoto was now branded a dangerous organization plotting to overturn the national polity.

In the interrogations carried out by military-linked organs that were already running amok, torture was routine; sixteen believers died mysterious deaths in prison, and the functioning of the sect was completely paralyzed. The authorities immediately banned Omoto's scriptures and other publications, sealing off its religious life both physically and spiritually. With the mass media entirely subservient to the military, newspapers day after day insulted and denounced Omoto in sensational terms as "traitors to the nation" and a "heretical sect," while fabrications concocted by the authorities—claims that the group had cached vast quantities of weapons and was plotting an insurrection—were broadcast to the public through newspapers and magazines. This dark legacy of the military's rampage remains a major reason why Japanese people today still harbor a deep-seated aversion to religion. So searing was the memory of what took place.

Thus Omoto was effectively destroyed, and Onisaburo himself was held in detention for years awaiting trial. Stripped of their places of worship by this second crackdown, many believers scattered; some drifted into other religious bodies, while others searched for new ways to carry forward the currents of Omoto thought. Yet was the hollowing out and collapse of Omoto really the work of a runaway military alone? To understand this crucial point, there is one figure we cannot overlook. Next time, I will trace that side of the story.

Indeed, the roughly eighty senior figures of the sect who had been arrested and prosecuted ultimately had their convictions dismissed in 1927 under an amnesty issued upon the death of Emperor Taisho. Freed by this amnesty to rebuild the organization, Onisaburo reorganized the leadership by installing close relatives—such as his sons-in-law Hidemaru Deguchi and Uchimaru Deguchi—as his new inner circle, while figures who had been close to Asano were pushed away from the center of power. When the sect pivoted toward accommodation with the regime, some sort of bargain may well have been struck, one of whose conditions was the ouster of the influential faction that looked to Asano.

Deguchi was an outstanding religious figure and a mystical thinker who carried out his own research. The central idea was kotodama. From then on Ueshiba moved with his family to Ayabe, lived under Deguchi, and devoted himself to religious discipline while farming. At that time in Omoto a special meditation called "chinkon kishin" (鎮魂帰神法) was the daily practice of believers. Chinkon kishin was handed down as a secret teaching of "koshinto" (古神道), ancient Shinto, which comes from the line of kokugaku. Koshinto is, put simply, the pure native Shinto before Buddhism arrived in the sixth century.

The one who promoted chinkon kishin was Chikatoshi Honda (1822-1889), a Shinto figure who lived through the turbulent age from the late Edo period. Honda's influence on people was immense, and Deguchi was greatly influenced by him and threw himself into chinkon kishin. Omoto also had the discipline of "misogi" (禊), pouring water over oneself in the cold. While Ueshiba went through these daily, Deguchi took note of Ueshiba's skill, as he was already a master of martial arts, and encouraged him to teach the martial arts to Omoto's believers. It changed Ueshiba's life. A training hall called the "Ueshiba Dojo" was opened at Ayabe, where Omoto's headquarters stood, and Ueshiba's own martial art, the prototype of later aikido, was passed on to Omoto's believers. Ueshiba revered Deguchi as his spiritual leader, and Deguchi cherished Ueshiba like his own child.

The founder of Seicho-no-Ie was Masaharu Taniguchi (1893–1985). … During the student uprisings, the organization fractured into fundamentalists seeking a return to Taniguchi’s original teachings and reformists adapting to the times; the latter eventually took the helm, steering the group leftward in the 1980s. But during the fierce clashes of 1968 and 1969—the climax of the 1970 Anpo (安保) protests—it was the youth wing formed by Taniguchi’s fundamentalist disciples that proved most formidable. Far more than a devout flock, they fused intellectual rigor with street violence to wage the most successful anti-communist campaign in the country.