One of the founders of the new Shinto religion of Oomoto, Onisaburō Deguchi was a spiritualist, philosopher, and artist who devoted his life to the principle that God is the spirit which pervades the entire universe and that all religions stem from the same root. Proclaiming that “art is the mother of religion,” he produced calligraphy, paintings, and tanka poems, as well as dozens of films. In 1935, as part of the suppression of Oomoto by an increasingly militarist and ultranationalist Japanese government, he was jailed. During his detention, he conceived the idea of making tea bowls, and later made over 3,000 of these pieces, posthumously named “Yōwan,” in a period of only fifteen months.
