From a Japanese Magazine to a Movement in Brazil

Seicho-no-Ie's doctrine that suffering is not ultimately real travelled well beyond Japan across the twentieth century, and Shimazono's study of modern Japanese religious movements traces its largest sustained following outside Japan to Brazil, where Japanese immigrant communities carried the teaching with them and where Seicho-no-Ie do Brasil grew into one of the largest Japanese-derived new religious movements anywhere in the diaspora, a growth pattern shared with only a small number of other Japanese new religions that reached comparable scale abroad. Shimazono situates Seicho-no-Ie within a wave of Japanese new religious movements that emerged or grew rapidly in the interwar and immediate postwar decades, a period of considerable religious innovation and reorganisation in Japan following the country's 1945 defeat and the postwar dismantling of State Shinto's privileged legal status. Later Seicho-no-Ie leadership shifted parts of the movement's public emphasis toward environmental concern from the late twentieth century onward, framing ecological responsibility as a natural extension of the teaching that a truer, already-whole reality underlies the phenomenal world's apparent damage, an emphasis that has become one of the more publicly visible faces of the movement's teaching in recent decades alongside its original doctrine of an unreal, surface-level suffering.