Tenri Yorozu-sodansho Foundation

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

The Tenri Yorozu-sodansho Foundation was established in 1935 to explore all possible means of relieving human suffering while retaining Tenrikyo teachings as its fundamental basis, a founding mandate broad enough to encompass conventional medicine, faith healing and general welfare consultation together rather than choosing one approach over the others from the outset.

Its own name says as much: Yorozu Sodansho means an all consultations office, pairing a general welfare consultation service with its healthcare activities under one institutional roof, a naming choice that signals the Foundation's breadth from the outset rather than describing a narrower medical or counseling mandate alone.

Operating under the auspices of the Tenrikyo religious organization, whose headquarters is in Tenri City, Japan, the Foundation's 1935 founding predates by three decades the specific hospital project that would become its most visible institutional expression, so its founding purpose was deliberately wider than any single facility it would later build to carry that broad mandate out in practice.

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

In 1966, thirty one years after its founding, the Foundation established Ikoi-no-Ie Hospital, a 900-bed general hospital at the Home of the Parent in Tenri City, Nara Prefecture, Japan, a scale that places it among substantial general hospitals rather than a small clinic attached to a religious headquarters.

Tenrikyo Church Headquarters' own website describes the hospital as organized into a Medical Treatment Department, a Religious Guidance Department and a Service Department, three departments working together rather than a conventional hospital with a chaplaincy attached as an afterthought. The structure combines conventional medicine with Tenrikyo faith healing toward what the religion calls the realization of the Joyous Life, treating the two as complementary parts of one practice rather than as separate, competing approaches to a patient's care.

That three-department structure, thirty one years after the Foundation's founding mandate to explore all possible means of relieving suffering while retaining Tenrikyo teachings, reads as the specific institutional form that founding mandate eventually took: a real hospital built to combine medical treatment with the religious practice its founders never intended to set aside.