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podcasts. Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast.

Episode 262, their Eyes Were Watching the Gods.

This week, I want to talk about something I've been meaning to find room to discuss for a while now,

one of Japan's most unique and important native new religious movements. It got its start in Ayabe, a small town on the outskirts of

Kyoto, on New Year's Day, 1892. A housewife named Deguchi Now was working, as she always had,

to care for her family, according to later biographies, which must be taken with a grain of salt for reasons we'll get into at a later point,

she'd already sold most of her worldly possessions and was working herself to the bone in order to keep the family afloat.

Exhausted from all the preparation that goes into the Japanese New Year,

Deguchi was probably all the more surprised when, to her astonishment,

...