23/10/2024
More important history from Aikido Sangenkai.
How to get arrested - Onisaburo Deguchi leads some 900 members of the Omoto Showa Shinseikai para-military corps (many of whom were trained by Morihei Ueshiba) in front of the Imperial Palace.
Dressed in an Army general's uniform, he rode a white horse, in the style of the Showa Emperor, in front of the Kempeitai (the Military Police) and proceeded to give a speech in which he stated that, "the Heavenly works of the Imperial Kingdom of Japan have not yet been fulfilled", and strongly implied that since the Showa Emperor had not fulfilled their mission, that he would now carry on that duty in their place.
He then proceeded to direct them in military exercises, sealing the lid on one of the primary triggers behind his eventual arrest.
It's often implied that Morihei Ueshiba severed connections with Omoto after the war, but he would use the business card on the top left in the later years of his life, which showed him as the Association President of Omoto-kyo's Jinrui Aizenkai, an organization founded by Onisaburo Deguchi in 1925.
A little about that organization here, from "Becoming One - Religion, Development, and Environmentalism in a Japanese NGO in Myanmar" by Chika Watanabe, University of Hawaii Press 2019:
"Another commonality is Onisaburō’s universalist message that went hand in hand with his kokugaku teachings, marrying visions of a liberal worldwide fraternity with Japanese imperialist ambitions. Onisaburō believed in a unity of human kind, which he sought to realize through initiatives such as the establishment of the Jinrui Aizenkai, or ULBA (Universal Love and Brotherhood Association), in 1925. But his idea of the universal was based on a belief in Japanese superiority. For example, he preached the primacy of a cosmic emperor who would govern the entire world and was embodied in the historical and political figure of the human Japanese emperor, and he believed that all civilizations, as well as Western science, derived from a universally applicable Japanese polity (Hirose 2001, 41; Yasumaru [1977] 2013, 195).3 As Nancy Stalker and others argue, Onisaburō’s global initiatives suggest that nationalism and internationalism, and right-wing and liberal ideologies, are mutually constitutive in Japan’s modern history, rather than reflecting different historical stages (Stalker 2008, 167; Hotaka 2012; see also Hirose 2002). The notion of Japanese superiority is undeniable in Onisaburō’s writings, but this was a nationalist vision that overlapped with the universal. In fact, the particularist language of Japaneseness served as the vehicle for his universal message, and vice versa. As we will see, the moral imaginations of Yonosuke and OISCA staffers echo this entanglement, intimating traces of Onisaburō’s philosophies in the NGO. "
*Note on "kokugaku": "The kokugaku school held that the Japanese national character was naturally pure, and would reveal its inherent splendor once the foreign (Chinese) influences were removed. The "Chinese heart" was considered different from the "true heart" or "Japanese Heart". This true Japanese spirit needed to be revealed by removing a thousand years of Chinese learning." - Earl, David Margarey, Emperor and Nation in Japan, Political Thinkers of the Tokugawa Period, University of Washington Press
He would also appear with members of the Deguchi family into the 1960's, and the association between the Ueshiba family and Omoto continues until the present day - Omoto priests officiate at the memorial to Morihei Ueshiba held each year at the Aiki Shrine in Iwama, and Morihei Ueshiba's grave rests in the Omoto compound in Ayabe.
