Tenrikyo Sheds State Shinto Doctrine After The War

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

Japan's surrender in August 1945 lifted the wartime restrictions that had bound Tenrikyo to the state's own religious order, restrictions that had recalled its own scriptures and banned its central service outright only a few years earlier. Between 1946 and 1949 the church republished its three main scriptures in full, the Mikagura-uta, the Ofudesaki and the Osashizu, texts that had been pulled from circulation under wartime pressure less than a decade before.

The republication was matched by a doctrinal revision, stripping out the State Shinto ideology the movement had been forced to adopt across the decades it spent first under Home Ministry surveillance and then under direct wartime suppression. The church undertaking that revision was rebuilding a doctrine that persecution, running from the 1870s through 1945, had never once let it hold in its own original form.

The recovery reached completion in 1966, when the church declared that Tenrikyo is nothing but Tenrikyo, a formal statement severing its last classification under Shinto altogether. What that declaration changed for Tenrikyo's spread was independence in substance as well as in law: a movement that had already won registration as a Sect Shinto branch in 1908, only to see the state reach back into its scriptures and its worship three decades later, did not treat that earlier standing as settled until this second, doctrinal break was complete.