Omoto's first collision with the Japanese state, in February 1921, targeted Onisaburo Deguchi personally. Police arrested him and several followers on charges of lese majeste and violation of the Newspaper Law, and he spent 126 days in jail before trial. An Osaka court convicted him, the Supreme Court overturned that verdict for what it called a serious defect in the ruling, and the government pursued retrials for years without ever reaching an enforceable conclusion; the case finally closed only through an amnesty following Emperor Taisho's death in 1926. Omoto did not merely survive the six year proceeding, it grew through it, membership climbing past two million by the early 1930s under the cosmology Onisaburo spent the same period dictating into the eighty one volumes of the Reikai Monogatari.
The Second Omoto Incident, beginning December 8, 1935, admitted no comparable delay. Armed police raided the movement's twin centers at Ayabe and Kameoka in one coordinated action, arrested more than three thousand followers nationwide and destroyed every Omoto facility in the country, dynamiting Kameoka's sacred hall outright rather than merely closing it. Sixteen members died from torture and the conditions of imprisonment before the war's end brought acquittal on the underlying Peace Preservation Law charges, and the postwar constitution dropped the lese majeste counts entirely. Onisaburo, when the state later offered reparations, refused them, calling the money blood taxes taken from a defeated people. Omoto reconstituted itself under the religious freedom the new constitution guaranteed and continues today with a reported membership near one hundred seventy thousand, a fraction of its prewar peak but proof the second ban did not hold either.