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Deguchi Nao (1837-1918)
Nov. 3rd, 2023 06:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nnozomiDeguchi Nao was born in 1837 in Tamba, an hour or so west of Kyoto, as the daughter of a carpenter whose dissipated ways of life plunged his family into desperate poverty; Nao was entirely uneducated because they could not afford to send her to school. She became an indentured servant at age ten. Adopted at seventeen by an aunt, she married two years later. However, her husband Masagoro was much like her father, a carpenter whose debauchery brought ruin on the family, and Nao endured the mockery of her surroundings as she picked up scrap and sold buns to support herself and her three sons and five daughters. Her husband died when she was fifty-one. Her children’s lives were likewise made difficult by their poverty, some working as servants, daughters married off early and struggling with mental illness, one son attempting suicide, another dying in the Sino-Japanese War.
In 1892, when she was fifty-five years old, she began to find herself calling out mysterious words in a great voice, overcome by divinity. Her neighbors thought her mind had given way. It is recorded that she could not stop the voice even if she tried, and felt horribly ashamed. “The age of the gods’ country has come!” “Mend your ways, people of the world!” “There shall be war between Japan and the Tang!” This last was to be taken as a prophesy of the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895. “The life of every one of our people is precious, and yet we take one another’s lives…” (a little reminiscent of Yosano Akiko’s “Kimi shinitamau koto nakare”).
Nao was accused of arson, arrested, and shut up at home by her son-in-law for forty days. She pleaded with her interlocutor, the god “Ushitora no Konjin”: “At least please stop coming into me and making me shout!” The god replied, it is said, “Then from now on let us resort to writing instead.” Nao’s body moved willy-nilly to pick up an old nail and scratch letters into a post, the first of her O-fudesaki writings. Released from her confinement, she—unschooled and illiterate—wrote thousands of pages in phonetic hiragana script, criticizing society, protesting the endless scrabble for a living that she and many others had been condemned to, arguing against thoughtless male domination, and quoting the god’s warning that people must mend their ways to avoid terrible retribution. “A great battle shall begin in Russia, and shall spread to envelop the whole world…” The text beginning thus, written in 1903, is still considered by her followers to prophesy the Russo-Japanese War, the Second World War, and Japan’s defeat in the latter.
Nao was also given the power to heal, and gradually became an object of worship. However, she longed to return to her former self, and consulted numerous priests and fortunetellers, none of whom could give her helpful advice.
One day, a young man called Ueda Kisaburo, a sometime theology student, teacher, and farmer from nearby Kameoka, received a divine message to “go northwest and find the one who awaits you.” It was Nao he met there. He turned out to be the one who could distinguish Nao from the god working in her; he was also to marry her youngest daughter, Sumiko, and take the name Deguchi Onisaburo. It was he, a formidable theorist and organizer, who would create the Omoto-kyo religion with Nao as its spiritual leader. Most of their first worshippers were poor peasants like Nao, but Onisaburo was able to bring in Japan’s elites as well, including a number of prominent naval officers as well as Ueshiba Morihei, the inventor of aikido.
Nao died at age 81 in 1918, leaving a thriving New Religion behind. Viciously oppressed during the war by the Japanese government, Omoto-kyo managed to survive and remains in existence today. I once had the experience of teaching English conversation to its administrative head at the time, Onisaburo’s grandson, a courteous and competent old gentleman.
Note that while she doesn’t have a page of her own here, another 19th-century woman, Nakayama Miki (1798-1887), had a similar experience of divine possession and spirit writing, becoming the founder of the Tenri-kyo New Religion.
Sources
Ishii, Mori 1996
http://www.oomoto.or.jp/English/enKyos/kaisoden/index.html (lengthy biography on the Omoto-kyo site)
https://www.omt.gr.jp/o72 (photo of Nao’s O-fudesaki writings)
In 1892, when she was fifty-five years old, she began to find herself calling out mysterious words in a great voice, overcome by divinity. Her neighbors thought her mind had given way. It is recorded that she could not stop the voice even if she tried, and felt horribly ashamed. “The age of the gods’ country has come!” “Mend your ways, people of the world!” “There shall be war between Japan and the Tang!” This last was to be taken as a prophesy of the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895. “The life of every one of our people is precious, and yet we take one another’s lives…” (a little reminiscent of Yosano Akiko’s “Kimi shinitamau koto nakare”).
Nao was accused of arson, arrested, and shut up at home by her son-in-law for forty days. She pleaded with her interlocutor, the god “Ushitora no Konjin”: “At least please stop coming into me and making me shout!” The god replied, it is said, “Then from now on let us resort to writing instead.” Nao’s body moved willy-nilly to pick up an old nail and scratch letters into a post, the first of her O-fudesaki writings. Released from her confinement, she—unschooled and illiterate—wrote thousands of pages in phonetic hiragana script, criticizing society, protesting the endless scrabble for a living that she and many others had been condemned to, arguing against thoughtless male domination, and quoting the god’s warning that people must mend their ways to avoid terrible retribution. “A great battle shall begin in Russia, and shall spread to envelop the whole world…” The text beginning thus, written in 1903, is still considered by her followers to prophesy the Russo-Japanese War, the Second World War, and Japan’s defeat in the latter.
Nao was also given the power to heal, and gradually became an object of worship. However, she longed to return to her former self, and consulted numerous priests and fortunetellers, none of whom could give her helpful advice.
One day, a young man called Ueda Kisaburo, a sometime theology student, teacher, and farmer from nearby Kameoka, received a divine message to “go northwest and find the one who awaits you.” It was Nao he met there. He turned out to be the one who could distinguish Nao from the god working in her; he was also to marry her youngest daughter, Sumiko, and take the name Deguchi Onisaburo. It was he, a formidable theorist and organizer, who would create the Omoto-kyo religion with Nao as its spiritual leader. Most of their first worshippers were poor peasants like Nao, but Onisaburo was able to bring in Japan’s elites as well, including a number of prominent naval officers as well as Ueshiba Morihei, the inventor of aikido.
Nao died at age 81 in 1918, leaving a thriving New Religion behind. Viciously oppressed during the war by the Japanese government, Omoto-kyo managed to survive and remains in existence today. I once had the experience of teaching English conversation to its administrative head at the time, Onisaburo’s grandson, a courteous and competent old gentleman.
Note that while she doesn’t have a page of her own here, another 19th-century woman, Nakayama Miki (1798-1887), had a similar experience of divine possession and spirit writing, becoming the founder of the Tenri-kyo New Religion.
Sources
Ishii, Mori 1996
http://www.oomoto.or.jp/English/enKyos/kaisoden/index.html (lengthy biography on the Omoto-kyo site)
https://www.omt.gr.jp/o72 (photo of Nao’s O-fudesaki writings)
