Spiritual Shinto: From Hirata Atsutane to Psychical Research

Hirata went further still: he mastered archaic Shinto rituals to enter altered states of consciousness, exploring the spirit world in person. Although he never had the opportunity to meet the great master of kokugaku, Norinaga Motoori (1730–1801), in life, Hirata claimed that after Norinaga’s death he journeyed to the realm of spirits to debate with him, where he was granted permission to become his disciple.

What matters profoundly is that the idiosyncratic cosmology Hirata constructed went on to reshape his very understanding of Shinto. Through his work, Shinto spirituality was brought into the light for the first time, laying the groundwork for the spiritual movements that followed. Without grasping Hirata’s pivotal role, one cannot understand how Shinto came to be regarded, across the two centuries leading down to our present day, as so thoroughly spiritual.

In this sense, it was Atsutane Hirata who first established Shinto spirituality. How was he able to achieve such a feat? One reason, surely, is that he did not begin as a specialist in either kokugaku or Shinto. Born to parents devoted to Confucianism, he spent his first twenty years living entirely estranged from the study of native antiquity, until he fled his hometown for Edo.

Even after arriving in the capital, he initially immersed himself in the Western sciences known as rangaku (蘭学, Dutch studies). But at the age of twenty-eight, his life took an abrupt turn when his wife happened to bring home a book by Norinaga Motoori and handed it to him. Grounded in Confucian ethics while freely absorbing rangaku, kokugaku, and Shinto, Hirata rose to become one of the premier intellectuals of his day.

Hirata’s largely unacknowledged achievement was to shatter the rigid, codified conservatism that had calcified Shinto throughout the Edo period, igniting popular curiosity toward the invisible world and linking that quest, through kokugaku, to Shinto itself. In doing so, he prepared the ground from which entirely new religious movements could erupt. Only by taking this into account can one begin to fathom the extraordinary diversity of Shinto in the transition from the late Edo period into modernity.

Its intellectual source was Norinaga Motoori, the Kokugaku scholar whom Hirata revered as his teacher. Norinaga held that "when people die, they fall into Yomi, the defiled land of the dead," and he said nothing of what lay beyond. Hirata could not bear this bleak view of life and death. Between them runs a rift, the rift between Norinaga, who lived in the eighteenth century before the upheavals began, and Hirata, who lived through the turbulent late Edo period. So in his major work, Tama no Mihashira (1813), Hirata boldly rebuilt the world after death, and this is the intellectual ground on which his teaching came to be called Fukko Shinto.

One point matters most here. Hirata taught that "life and death are inseparable." Norinaga, for his part, had thought of life and death as separate.

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.

Asano, who left Omoto after the 1921 incident, turned sharply toward scientific inquiry into psychic phenomena. Two years later, in 1923, he founded the Society for Psychic Science Research in Hongo, Tokyo, and launched Shinrei Kenkyu (Psychic Research), Japan's first magazine devoted to the subject, which drew great attention. Asano had been an English teacher and was strong in languages, so he was already deeply versed in Western spiritualist thought. He introduced and translated Western psychic research and also ran experiments of his own. As a result he came to a conviction: "The soul is real, and communication with the world after death can be proved scientifically." Asano's undertaking opened the movement of modern psychic research in Japan. It was very different from Onisaburo, who from then on leaned toward political activity.

Asano's psychic research also spread beyond Japan. In 1928 he took part, as a Japanese representative together with Dr. Tomokichi Fukurai, in the third congress of the International Spiritualist Federation (ISF) held in London, where Fukurai presented his research on clairvoyance and thoughtography. Fukurai was a professor at Tokyo Imperial University (now the University of Tokyo) and led research on paranormal phenomena, and Asano's joining him at this international meeting became an occasion to send Japanese psychic research out to the world and to deepen exchange with researchers abroad.

Leading this new wind, Asano founded the Tokyo Psychic Science Association in Tokyo in 1929 and built a base for the prewar "spiritualist movement" in Japan.