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Erick Mead wrote:
I don't know where to begin. I demur on any opinion about Opus Dei. While Catholic, I have no brief for or against the group. I find the Spanish Civil War much less apt for comparison. I find no evidence that the Falangist government ever suppressed Opus Dei, or for that matter, any organ of the Church.
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The lack of a suppression of Opus Dei is noted in my first post and marked as a difference in the two circumstances. I'm not sure what your point is here.
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Erick Mead wrote:
And yet congruency is not identity -- as the prior and later conflict between Omoto and the government easily demonstrate.
Is there any evidence that the government subsidized the Mongolian effort? I have read of none.
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The question is not one of direct subsidy, nor is the question one of direct connection with government members such as those you note. The question is one of Oomoto connections with Yoshida, Toyama, Uchida, and Sasakawa, whose activites in relation to Manchuria and Mongolia were much less public, but quite influential. Even in the arguably less sinister case of Takeshita, it appears that his connection with Ueshiba came about a result of prior Omoto connections and not independently.
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Erick Mead wrote:
Again, what evidence is there that Deguchiwas seen as any kind of ally by those like Konoe, much less Tojo? Maybe Deguchi was viewed, by some, as Lenin famously phrased "a useful idiot," but hardly more than that, and certainly not after 1921.
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A civilian contractor needn't have any direct relationship with George W. Bush or Condoleeza Rice in order to get out of Iraq after winding up in a dicey situation. He need only have been working there at the behest of Eric Prince. Substitute Konoe or Tojo for Bush and Uchida or Toyama for Prince, and the question that arises is this: just who is whose "useful idiot?"
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Erick Mead wrote:
Speculation. And not very useful speculation, since Franco used the image of sanctity in the Church to try and deny diminish or excuse his own excesses -- Omoto did not and could not possibly not have played any such comparative role, even if it had not twice been suppressed.
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Not at all. It is merely that the attempted use of Omoto to provide an image of sanctity for Japanese policies was a matter of foreign policy in Mongolia, rather than domestic policy in Japan, and arguably a distinctively Japanese solution to the problem of a rival claimant to the Imperial Throne -- for Deguchi was widely rumored within Omoto to be a hidden bastard child of the royal line with a better claim to the throne than its occupant.
In essence, you're arguing that the two cases aren't similar because Franco successfully used the Church domestically, and rightist attempts to use Omoto as a cat's paw in Mongolia failed.
This is rather like arguing that you know what hollandaise sauce is and I couldn't have possibly been making hollandaise because a reliable observer told you that my sauce broke.
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Erick Mead wrote:
State Shinto is the descendant of Atsutane's take on Norinaga's Japanese exceptionalism expressed in the massive and culturally monolithic recasting of the Kojiki. Atsutane's legitimacy as an authoritative interpreter of Norinaga is debatable. The Konkokyo influence on Omoto hews more closely to the Oyomei priniciples that are usually pointed to as implicit in Kojiki-Den, notwithstanding its subsequent uses by Atsutane and his followers to make Norinaga into a stalking horse for triumphal exceptionalism -- and trumping Norinaga's elucidation of "mono no aware." Ueshiaba's writings and those of Omoto are far more in the latter sensibility than the former, to my thinking.
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Intellectual history is entertaining from time to time, but rarely dispositive and rarely a matter of great concern to activists like Deguchi, who are more concerned with the affective potential of a truth claim than its substance or accuracy.
At the end of all this, I am arguing for a relatively simple proposition that is well supported factually: Omoto was riddled with what we can call, for lack of a better or shorter phrase, "authoritarian militarist influence."
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the picture above is just an unavoidable formal portrait. But that's a very low order maybe.
Best,
FL