Tenrikyo built an unusually solid institutional base and is now watching it contract.
The headquarters at Tenri in Nara prefecture is a religious town of a kind Japan has few of: the sanctuary complex, dormitories for pilgrims, Tenri University, a large hospital, a research library of several million volumes with important manuscript holdings, a museum with substantial archaeological and ethnographic collections, and a high school known nationally for its sports teams. Members serve terms of residential work there. The Disaster Relief Hinokishin Corps deploys to earthquakes and floods in Japan and abroad and is among the better organised religious relief bodies in the country.
Mission began early and overseas: the United States in 1896, Taiwan in 1897, Korea in 1898, China in 1901, with later work in Brazil, Africa, Nepal and elsewhere. The foreign presence is real but small, and remains concentrated in Japanese emigrant communities.
The numbers are falling and the organisation does not conceal it. Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs recorded 2,298,420 Tenrikyo followers in 1974 and 1,121,541 in 2025. Tenrikyo itself reports roughly two million worldwide, and around 16,800 local churches operate in Japan.
One caveat applies to all Japanese religious statistics. Affiliation is generally reported by the organisation on a household basis and counts people who may never attend, so official totals across all Japanese religions greatly exceed the population of the country. The direction of the trend is nonetheless clear, and it matches the wider decline of the Japanese new religions founded in the nineteenth century.