Omoto's own founding pairs oddly matched figures. Deguchi Nao was an impoverished, largely illiterate widow who began receiving revelations from Ushitora no Konjin in 1892 and recorded them through a spirit writing she could not fully read back; Onisaburo Deguchi, who married into her family, gave that raw revelation its cosmology, its scripture and its institutions, and it was his expansive, sometimes reckless ambition that made Omoto the seedbed it became. In 1924 Onisaburo slipped out of Japan for Manchuria with a small band of followers, aiming to raise a spiritual army and install himself at the head of an independent Mongolia. The warlord backing the scheme turned on it once its ambitions grew too large, and Onisaburo and his followers, Morihei Ueshiba among them, were lined up for execution before the Japanese consulate intervened; the two men were shackled together for the journey home.
Ueshiba had come to Ayabe in 1920 already trained in Daito ryu jujutsu, and Onisaburo encouraged him to teach it to Omoto's own followers, the origin of the dojo Ueshiba built into aikido; aikido's stated purpose of reconciling rather than defeating an opponent still carries Omoto cosmology forward. Mokichi Okada took a quieter path through the same movement, joining Omoto in the 1920s before a 1926 revelation of his own led him to found Sekai Kyusei Kyo in 1935, the same year Omoto's own headquarters were being dynamited. A generation later, Yoshikazu Okada trained as a minister under that church before leaving it in 1953 to found Mahikari, a lineage running from Omoto through Sekai Kyusei Kyo rather than a direct line, but a lineage all the same. Few new religions anywhere have seeded as many successors as the one the state tried twice to erase.