This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Following the magnitude 9.0 earthquake and tsunami that struck northeastern Japan on 11 March 2011, Tenrikyo mobilized its Disaster Relief Hinokishin Corps into the affected Tohoku region.
By 12 April 2011, 901 corps members from the Miyagi Diocese and reinforcing dioceses including Shiga, Gifu, Aichi, Yamanashi, Hokkaido and Kyoto had worked in Higashimatsushima, a coastal city devastated by the tsunami, clearing mud and wreckage from the disaster.
On 8 April 2011, Tenrikyo's Ikoi no Ie Hospital in Nara Prefecture sent an eight member medical team, three doctors, three nurses, a pharmacist and a clinical laboratory technician, to an evacuation center in Kesennuma, Miyagi Prefecture, where the team treated 145 patients over five days.
Across the full response, which continued for more than four months, roughly 18,600 corps members and several thousand ordinary Tenrikyo followers took part. A fundraising campaign running from 12 March to 31 December 2011 raised 450 million yen for the prefectural governments of Fukushima, Miyagi and Iwate, with a further 285 million yen raised for the corps itself and for Tenrikyo branch churches damaged by the disaster.
What the Tohoku response changed for Tenrikyo's disaster relief work was demonstrating a mobilization spanning more than four months, tens of thousands of participants and two separate fundraising totals directed at both the wider region and the tradition's own damaged churches.