Kuninotokotachi's most dramatic modern role came not from mainstream Shinto but from a new religious movement founded at the end of the nineteenth century. In 1892 a Japanese peasant woman named Deguchi Nao began experiencing possession by a deity who identified itself as Ushitora no Konjin, and the automatic writings she produced, later compiled as the Ofudesaki, became the founding scripture of the new religion Omoto.
Within Omoto's theology, this once-feared, ill-omened spirit of popular divination was reinterpreted and identified with Kuninotokotachi no Mikoto, recast as the true, original ruling god of the world who had been driven out in the ancient past by lesser deities and was now returning to purify and restore a corrupted world before a coming age of renewal. This reworking took the nearly silent primordial kami of the Nihon Shoki, previously significant chiefly to specialist theologians such as the Yoshida school, and turned him into an active, apocalyptic figure at the center of a living religious movement with real historical consequences: Omoto grew rapidly in the early twentieth century, drew the suspicion of the Japanese state for its unorthodox and at times millenarian teachings, and was twice suppressed by government authorities, in 1921 and again in 1935, precisely because a theology built around Kuninotokotachi's promised return to rightful rule was heard by the authorities as a challenge to the emperor's own claimed divine authority. The episode shows how a figure who is little more than a name in the oldest chronicles could, centuries later, become the doctrinal center of a movement taken seriously enough to be twice forcibly dismantled by the state.