PL Kyodan

"I happen to have been among the first non-Japanese scholars to visit Perfect Liberty (PL) Kyodan, both in Japan and in Brazil, where it has a sizeable presence, in the 1980s, publishing an entry on it in my encyclopedic book in Italian “Le nuove religioni” (The New Religions) in 1989. PL Kyodan is the descendant of a long tradition of “mountain sects” and its origins can be traced back to the establishment of Tokumitsu-kyo, a sub-sect of the Shinto group Mitake-kyo, by Osaka merchant Tokumitsu Kanada in 1912. One of Kanada’s main followers was a Zen priest called Tokuharu Miki, who changed the name of the movement in 1931 [to] Hito-no-Michi and presided over its [growth] to roughly one million member[s]. He died in 1938 and was succeeded by his son Tokuchika Miki. As happened to other religious movements that did not support the militaristic regime during the war years, Hito-no-Michi was dissolved and Tokuchika Miki was arrested. He was released in 1946 and [afterwards, he] reorganized the movement with the new name PL Kyodan. When after his death he was succeeded in 1983 by his adopted son Takahito Miki (who died in 2020), the group had some three million members, with a substantial expansion in Latin America and a presence in the United States, Canada, and elsewhere."