Konkokyo

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Konkokyo does not center on communal liturgy or scripture study alone; it centers on toritsugi, a one on one act of mediated prayer that the founder Kawate Bunjiro performed himself before it became the ordained work of the religion's ministers, called kyoshi. A person brings a concrete trouble, illness, a difficult harvest, a family conflict, to a minister at one of Konkokyo's roughly 1,550 churches. The minister listens, then carries the words in prayer to Tenchi Kane no Kami, the single parental deity Konkokyo holds responsible for heaven and earth together, and relays back what comes of it.

The practice rests on a specific claim about how the deity and human beings relate: Tenchi Kane no Kami wishes to help and save people but, in Kawate Bunjiro's own recorded words, can do so only through other people. Toritsugi is the structure built to carry that dependency in both directions, so that divine help arrives through a named minister's attention rather than from an unmediated distance.

As of a December 2012 count, about 3,909 kyoshi carried out this practice across the religion's churches, a figure that gives some sense of how central the one on one meeting remains to Konkokyo, a century and a half after Kawate Bunjiro first began sitting with troubled visitors in Otani village.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Konkokyo began in 1859 not as a doctrine but as a personal crisis. Kawate Bunjiro, a farmer in Otani village in Bitchu Province, suffered a serious illness that folk belief of the time blamed on offending a wrathful earth deity, and it was in the course of recovering from it that he began receiving what he took to be direct communication from a deity he came to call Tenchi Kane no Kami, heaven and earth's single parental kami rather than one spirit among Shinto's many.

He recorded these revelations and his own teachings in what became the Konkokyo Kyoten, later compiled from his memoirs, a record of the revelations themselves, and a collected teachings section, and he began the practice of toritsugi, meeting personally with neighbors who brought their own troubles for him to carry to the deity.

The religion he began was not formally organized during his own lifetime; it took his successors, later generations of the Konko family, to build the institution, and it did not receive separate government recognition until 1900, seventeen years after his death, when it was accepted among the thirteen groups recognized under Sect Shinto, the pre war administrative category for new religious movements built around a single founder's teaching. It remains headquartered at Konko cho, the district in Asakuchi, Okayama Prefecture, that grew up around Kawate Bunjiro's own home and ministry, and counted about four hundred fifty thousand members as of a December 2012 count.