This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The religion Kawate Bunjiro founded through his mediating prayer practice beginning in 1859 was not organized as a formal institution during his own lifetime. Konkokyo existed, in its founder's own years, as the personal practice he carried out in Otani village, Bitchu Province, listening to individual visitors' troubles and mediating between them and Tenchi Kane no Kami rather than as a structured religious body with the offices and organization that would come later.
Formal institutional recognition came only after Kawate Bunjiro's death in 1883, when Konkokyo gained separate government recognition in 1900, seventeen years after the founder who began the practice was gone. The gap between the founding activity in 1859 and government recognition in 1900, spanning more than four decades, means the institution now known by that name took a shape its own founder never saw completed.
That sequence, a personal mediating practice preceding any formal religious institution by decades, distinguishes Konkokyo's founding from religions organized from the outset around a fixed institutional structure. What Kawate Bunjiro left behind at his death was a practice and a following rather than a finished organization, and it was later hands that built the recognized institution from it.