Encyclopedia of Shinto

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カテゴリー1： 8. Schools, Groups, and Personalities
カテゴリー2： Modern Sectarian Groups
Title
Shinmei Aishinkai
Text
A Shinto-derived new religion founded by Komatsu Shin'yō (1928- ). Komatsu was born in Yokohama to a mother from a lineage of hereditary Shinto priests (shake). In 1976, shortly after a friend made a prophecy that a kami was about to descend to earth, Komatsu experienced a visitation from the deity Amaterasu ōmikami. First, the spirits of her ancestors manifested themselves to her, followed in succession by the Dragon King (Ryūō), the bodhisattva Kannon (Skt. Avalokitesvara), and finally Amaterasu ōmikami. From that time, the kami Amaterasu worked through Komatsu, who served to relate the revelations received from the deity.
Komatsu engaged in various religious practices and gradually gathered a group of disciples. In 1983 she registered the movement as a legal religious corporation. The group's main activities focus on rituals meant to bring about the liberation of various spirits mired in this world, thus eradicating hindrances throughout the world and facilitating human salvation and worldly prosperity. These activities are known in the movement as okiyome gyōji ("rituals of purification"). These rituals have at times been focused on international issues such as German reunification and the reunification of the Korean peninsula. At the time of the group's annual major autumn festival, it conducts a ritual known as the kamiyo gyōretsu ("procession of the divine age") in which movement's followers dress in costumes representing various kami and parade through the town, thus expressing a great assembly of the deities. Besides its headquarters in Tokyo, it has established branch centers in Nasu and Hokkaido.
Headquarters: Tokyo
Nominal membership: approximately 30,000 (S)

— Inoue Nobutaka

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