A World Held Not Ultimately Real

Seicho-no-Ie, the House of Growth, founded in Japan in 1930 by Masaharu Taniguchi, teaches that the phenomenal world as it presents itself, sickness, poverty and suffering included, is not the final reality but an appearance laid over a truer condition in which the human being is already whole and already a child of God. Susumu Shimazono's study of modern Japanese religious movements situates this teaching within a wider circulation of ideas: Taniguchi drew explicitly on American New Thought writing, encountered in translation and through his own reading, and set it beside Shinto and Buddhist material already present in Japanese religious life, along with a strong emphasis on ancestor veneration, producing a doctrine that reads as recognisably New Thought in structure while remaining culturally and doctrinally distinct from its American counterparts in its content. Shimazono's account notes that Taniguchi began the movement not as a temple or a church but as a magazine, circulating this teaching in print well before Seicho-no-Ie acquired the formal organisational apparatus, temples, ministers and structured congregational life, that a religious movement usually needs to sustain itself across generations, a print-first growth pattern the movement shares with several other Japanese new religions of the same interwar period.