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66 3 The Birth of Two Celebrity Gods While large new religions like Ōmoto and Hito no Michi made an impact on prewar Japanese society, there were many other smaller groups that were far removed from the public spotlight. Although they became nationally notorious in the immediate postwar years, the leaders of Jiu and Tenshō Kōtai Jingū Kyō, Nagaoka Nagako and Kitamura Sayo, were virtually unknown to the public during the prewar years. Both women were highly charismatic leaders who inspired intense devotion among their followers. The conditions of pre-1945 society had a significant effect on their identities in terms of their eventual relationships with the public, the authorities, and the media during the Occupation and immediate postwar periods. part i: before Jikōson Nagaoka Nagako (sometimes referred to as Yoshiko) was born in 1904 to a relatively prosperous farming family in Okayama prefecture. She finished one year of junior high school and then became a student nurse at an ophthalmology clinic. In 1924, she moved to Kobe and worked during the day as a nurse, and studied at a night school. However, she had a weak constitution and contracted tuberculosis. She was forced to return to Okayama in 1927. During the period of recuperation she stayed in a local Zen temple for a time. This experience marked the beginning of her religious career. In 1925 she married a seaman and moved with him to Yokohama. Her husband was often away from home and she soon became bored with married life. Although the next few years passed without remarkable incident, in 1928 she began to suffer intense fevers. After the fevers, she would fall into a trancelike state. These incidents occurred once every three months on average.1 The high fevers and spiritual possessions continued, and a doctor diagnosed her as having a kind of infantile paralysis. It appears that she neither received nor sought treatment for this condition. birth of celebrity gods | 67 According to her account that was related to a researcher from scap’s Religions Division in 1946, she received a revelation on 20 September 1934 in which she was guided “under the leadership of a white-bearded old man, through the celestial spheres… [and saw] the supreme goddess for the first time.” During this journey, which apparently took four-and-a-half hours, this deity told her to “teach the eternal unchanging truth, save the people and work for the nation in a time of dire need.”2 In another separate interview with a Religions Division staff member, she stated that she had seen “not only the Supreme Deity but the souls of deceased persons both high and low, beginning from Buddha, Avalokitesvara [sic], Jesus Christ, Emperors Jinmu and Meiji down to common people.”3 This spiritual awakening indicated a self-realization of a special mission to save the nation from calamity. She saw herself as a messenger of a deity that passed on to her various predictions of calamities and told her of people’s past lives. This experience had a profound effect on those who eventually followed her but also became the subject of mocking in the press later. Nagaoka’s beginnings as a shamanic medium have some resonance with the female founders and leaders of new religions described by Carmen Blacker, which include Tenrikyō’s Nakayama Miki, Ōmoto’s Deguchi Nao, and Tenshō Kōtai Jingū Kyō’s Kitamura Sayo. She held that kyōso, who were mostly women, were sickly, neurotic, hysterical, odd, until a moment comes when, exacerbated by suffering, these symptoms rise to a climactic interior experience of a mystical kind. A deity, by means of a dream or a possession, seizes them and claims them for his service. Thenceforward they are changed characters . Their former oddity and sickliness give way to a remarkable strength and magnetism of personality, which is conferred on them, together with various supernormal powers, by the deity who has possessed them and who henceforth governs their lightest move.4 Ellen Schattschneider describes spirit mediums located in Aomori prefecture in northern Tohoku, Japan, as women who are “usually called into sacred service later in life through revelatory visions or profound illness.”5 This description also shows similarities to Nagaoka’s experience. Accounts of visionary journeys have long been part of Japanese religious consciousness, and these include Buddhist tales and other stories. Yet Nagaoka’s experience is also reminiscent of the remarkable story of a journey by Ōmoto’s Onisaburō, whose descent into a hell...

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