This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Kawate Bunjiro, later known by the religious title Konko Daijin, was a farmer in Bitchu Province, western Japan, whose serious illness in 1855 he attributed to offending Konjin, a locally feared deity associated with misfortune and taboo violations. Continued affliction within his family in the years that followed led him to look for a different relationship with the deity rather than continued fear of it.
In 1859, at the direction of a deity he came to call Tenchi Kane no Kami, the golden kami of heaven and earth, Kawate Bunjiro gave up farming and devoted himself instead to a new practice: listening to people's troubles and mediating between them and the deity through prayer, offered on behalf of anyone who came to him rather than for himself alone.
That practice of mediating prayer, begun on November 15, 1859, the date adherents observe as the religion's founding, became the founding activity of Konkokyo. What started as one farmer's personal search for a less fearful relationship with a locally feared deity became, through the mediating role he took on for others, a distinct religious practice that outlasted the illness that had prompted it.
Kawate Bunjiro carried out that mediating role from his home village of Otani, in Bitchu Province, for the rest of his life, and the shift the practice represented, from a farmer petitioning a feared deity on his own behalf to a mediator praying on behalf of anyone who came to him, is the founding act the religion still dates itself from.