Masaharu Taniguchi

Taniguchi studied English literature at Waseda and left without finishing, and the English is important: it gave him direct access to the American New Thought writers whose work was not yet available in Japanese. He worked for a period in the Omoto movement, a Shinto-derived new religion with a charismatic founder and a large following, and left after the state suppression of 1921 and his own disillusionment with the leadership.

In 1930 he began publishing a magazine of his own, Seicho no Ie, the house of growth. The magazine was the movement: readers wrote in, healings were reported, circulation grew rapidly, and an organisation assembled itself around the subscription list. The multi-volume work on the truth of life that he assembled out of the material sold in enormous quantities and remains the group's principal text.

The teaching is New Thought in its structure and Japanese in its furniture. The phenomenal world, with its sickness, poverty and conflict, is jissou no nai, without true substance; the real human being is already the perfect child of God, and suffering persists only while that is not recognised. He drew freely on Buddhist vocabulary, on Shinto reverence for the ancestors, and on Christian scripture, and held that the great religions describe the same reality, which is a position the American movement had reached by a different route.

The link between Seicho-no-Ie and the American movement is direct and personal. Taniguchi read the New Thought writers in English, and he corresponded with Fenwicke Holmes, brother of Ernest Holmes of Religious Science, with whom he eventually published jointly. That connection makes his movement the clearest case of the American teaching taking root in a language and a culture entirely outside the one that produced it, and then developing on its own terms.

It travelled again from Japan. Japanese emigration to Brazil in the first half of the twentieth century created a very large community there, and Seicho-no-Ie followed it, becoming a substantial presence with a membership that has long since extended well beyond the Japanese-descended population. There are branches in North America and elsewhere.

Two things belong in the record and are stated without further characterisation. Taniguchi wrote in support of the Japanese state during the war, and those writings are a documented and contested part of his output; and the organisation has been involved in Japanese politics in the postwar period in ways that have been publicly argued about. Seicho-no-Ie is a living organisation with a current membership, and the atlas describes it rather than assessing it.

He led the movement until shortly before his death in 1985, having built from a magazine one of the larger religious bodies founded in twentieth century Japan.