Onisaburo Deguchi

, born Ueda Kisaburō 上田 喜三郎 (1871–1948), is considered one of the two spiritual leaders of the Ōmoto religious movement in Japan. Onisaburo had studied Honda Chikaatsu's "Spirit Studies" (Honda Reigaku), he also learned to mediate spirit possession (chinkon kishin) from Honda's disciple Nagasawa Katsutate in Shizuoka. He met the founder of Omotokyo in 1898 and in 1899 they established the Kinmeikai, later called Kinmei Reigakkai. In 1900 Kisaburō married Nao's fifth daughter Sumi and adopted the name Deguchi Onisaburō. Oomoto teaches that the guardian spirit of Nao is Amaterasu, described as a male spirit in a female body, and Onisaburo's spirit is Susanowo, a female spirit in a male body. In 1908 he and Deguchi Nao founded the Dai Nihon Shūseikai which in 1913 became Taihonkyō and in 1916 the Kōdō Ōmoto. In 1923, he learned Esperanto, an international planned language, and introduced it to the activities of Oomoto. In 1924, retired naval captain Yutaro Yano and his associates within the Black Dragon Society invited Onisaburo on a journey to Mongolia. Onisaburo led a group of Oomoto disciples, including Aikido founder Morihei Ueshiba. Ikki Kita had previously been sent to China by the Black Dragon Society and had in 1919 proposed that Esperanto be the only language spoken in the Empire of Japan. In Ōmoto Incident, he had been detained for about six years and a half since his arrest in 1935. He is remembered as a jovial patriarch of that school and is best known to Westerners as a teacher and religious instructor of Morihei Ueshiba, the founder of aikido. A believer in the Oomoto maxim that it was humanity's duty to move forward together, bringing about a new age of existence on Earth, Onisaburo went to great lengths to promote the syncretic faith preached by Nao Deguchi. He wrote the Reikai Monogatari (Tales of the Spirit World), an 81-volume work that covered his alleged travels into the spiritual planes of existence, as well as many other theologically permeated stories which expounded on numerous Oomoto spiritual ideals.