 What's up guys, Evil D here and today I'm going to do another video on an interesting historical aspect of the Esperanto community. This time I'm going to be focusing on Amotto, which is a Japanese religion, and it's links with Esperanto the created language. Or in this case, the language of heaven. I'll get into more detail about what that means later in the presentation. I got the vast majority of these materials from this book, Racconti el Amotto, which basically translates as stories from Amotto. It's an excellent read, but only available in Esperanto. If you can read Esperanto, I highly recommend that you get this book. So I guess I need to first explain what is Amotto. So Amotto is a Japanese religion founded in 1892, which means it was founded about roughly the same time in history when Esperanto was created. Esperanto was first published in 1887, so you can see they came around in the time in history when they were experiencing similar things. Now, the name of Amotto translates to roughly Great Foundation or Great Source, something along those lines. It's not a massive religion, but it's still sizeable to any extent. It's got 170,000 official members. And I think I read that there's about 200 people who work full-time in different religious organizations within the religion itself. And in fact, there's a fair few people who speak Esperanto and work within those organizations. You'll hear more about that later. It's a new religion, which is based on Shinto, but also on the writings of Deguchi Naur. It's a kind of a single-dayty religion, but also not at the same time. So you've got to remember that Western religions and Eastern religions are quite different. So the idea of God in this religion is of one single thing, but it's made up of many different aspects. And these aspects are called Kami, or Kami. And they basically are layered, but they all make up the same thing, even though they had their own personalities and whatnot. So you could say it's a single-dayty religion, or you could say it's a multi-dayty religion. It's really just based on perspective. And it has a really unique history entwined with Esperanto, which is what got me interested in it in the first place. So the religion was founded by Deguchi Naur in 1892. Now, when she founded the religion, she was actually 55 years old and she didn't found the religion herself. So she had lived quite a miserable life. It was quite poor. She lost family members. Her husband died. And when she was 55 years old, she woke up one day possessed by a spirit and started prophesizing the end of the world and an eventual saviour. She didn't say who the saviour was and it's not really clarified, but that's what she started stating. Now, she was illiterate. She couldn't write. She couldn't read. But in spite of this, she managed to write over 200,000 pages of prophecies, which is quite, quite amazing if you don't know how to read or write. Now, she used a method which is called automatic writing. You've probably all seen it in the movies where, like, someone's possessed by a spirit and they're kind of just, like, writing away, but they're not really focused on what they're writing. They didn't write that. It's like the spirits using them to write it. And all of these writings were collected together and were put together into something called the Fudesaki. Now, I'll go into detail about how that happened. So at this time, when she was having these prophecies, she was basically searching out what was happening to her and she was going to all these different religious groups that were forming around her. This part of Japan at this time in history was, like, full of religious revival and religions, like, new religions. There was basically a new religion in every town and she was trying to find out who could tell her what was happening. Eventually, she joined several different groups, but she realized she was just being, you know, taken for the run. They were just using her and she decided to create her own religion in a sense. Now, it wasn't like she just woke up and went, I'm going to create my own religion, but she started talking about her prophecies and a religion formed around her. Now, this guy here on this Saburo de Gucci, he married her daughter and he started organizing all her writers' writings together into one set of scripture, which basically codified the religion. Now, it wasn't called Omoto at this stage in history. It had a different name as happens a lot for religions and eventually it became Omoto. It was just like this small little group of individuals who came together and it kind of started growing from there. So, an interesting aspect of this religion is that the spiritual leaders have generally been women. The only real exception to that is the previous guy because he played an important role in codifying the religion. But apart from him, the majority of leaders have been women. And as I stated, there's several levels to their belief in God. You've got your main God at the top, then you've got a God of Heaven, a God of Earth, and under that you've got Kami's. And all of them are considered gods, but all of them are kind of separate, but at the same time, all kind of one. Now, the Kami's generally are like small spiritual gods, like lesser gods. And it's interesting that a lot of the Kami's actually are spirits of historically important people, especially religious people. But one of the Kami's, which is where it gets interesting, is actually Zamenhof. So, Zamenhof is considered a lesser God in this religion. So, you're probably wondering how it got to that. And I guess we need to go through some of the history of Amato itself. So, it started with persecution. It always starts with persecution. So, there's one part of the Amato belief system, which basically the Emperor didn't like. They believed that there was two original Kami, and they were driven out of Japan by the Kami or the ancestors of the Imperial line. So, basically they were at odds with the Emperor. You've got to remember at this time, everyone believed that the Emperor was God. And they were saying that, yes, he's a God, but he's not the original God. So, that caused a lot of problems. And obviously, the secret police at that time got involved. Every nation had a secret police at that time. So, in 1921, a lot of the followers of Amato were arrested. Their property was confiscated and their shrines were destroyed by the secret police. And Onisaburo himself, he was briefly arrested, but they didn't go too hardcore. They basically just walked in, destroyed everything and went, they'll teach you guys. Now, pray to the Emperor. And it's exactly at this same time in history when Onisaburo was reading about and learning about Esperanto. He actually had heard about Esperanto because there was an Esperanto speaker who was a friend and a secretary of his. And he was becoming interested in Esperanto. And then there's a local course that kind of popped up at a university near him. And that was run by some Esperanto speakers who had come in from Tokyo because there was a big earthquake there at the time. And he really wanted to go to this course and learn about Esperanto, but he couldn't. He knew the secret police were watching him. And if he went to some course and learned about an international language, well, they would just think, well, he's definitely trying to spread his belief system outside the country. And that's just bad. So instead, he sent a woman in his place, a young woman. Now, he did this because at that time in history, young women or just women in general weren't considered to be politically dangerous in any form. So he sent her there and the secret police completely ignored it. She learned Esperanto came back, reported to him and she actually became a really important figure in the Amato community. Haha, screw you, secret police. After that, in 1925, when the emperor finally passed, all this persecution basically came to an end because there was really no need for it anymore. And I'm guessing that the follow-up Emperor Empress, whoever was next in charge, wasn't really interested in our Amato so much at that time. You gotta remember, this is now leading up to World War II. And as a result comes the second incident. And this was the worst of the two incidents. So in 1935, over 1,000 Amato leaders and founders were arrested and jailed. And Onisabudo himself was put on trial and then imprisoned for six years. This persecution of Amato followers continued until the end of World War II. So they're basically, they'll completely shut down because the Japanese could not have a pacifist religion which was kind of against the Emperor existing while they were at war with the rest of the world. Now, the persecution ended after World War II and the government, the new Japanese government actually offered to pay up all the damages for all the stuff that was destroyed, property that was taken, people were arrested and jailed. But the followers of Amato actually rejected this saying that they didn't want to be a burden on the rebuilding of Japanese societies. So you can see that they were really pacifist in this regard. So Amato today is still primarily a Japanese religion. Now, its religious texts are only available in Japanese but some parts of them have been translated to Esperanto and to a lesser extent English. Zamenhof is seen as a lesser God within this religion and this is actually what they stated when they made him a lesser God. The spirit of Zamenhof even now continues to act as a missionary of the angelic kingdom. Therefore, his spirit was deified in the Senresha Shrine. Esperanto actually entered Japan very early during the history of Esperanto itself but it kind of died off after a little bit of time. Then in 1990, the Japanese Esperanto Institute was founded and they basically started promoting Esperanto in the newspapers and that's how Onisaburo heard about it. Now, at the same time in history, there was a lot of Baha'i followers coming into Japan and promoting their religion through Esperanto and basically the two movements, Amato and the Baha'i, met each other using Esperanto and talked a lot. Now, as you can see here, it was Haruko Kato who was secretary to Onisaburo who first learned Esperanto and then promoted it to Onisaburo. And in 1923, after Onisaburo became interested, he started promoting it within the Amato community and then 130 people took up the first course, started learning Esperanto. And after that, more and more people who were followers of Amato started taking up and learning Esperanto, just one course after another after another. And this was at that time during the second persecution. Well, the secret police were starting to get a little bit afraid of this to the point where they started sending secret police, not like as secret police but disguised to these courses to learn Esperanto to find out what the Amato were interested in. So on the 24th of November 1923, Onisaburo basically declared after 10 years all people, I'm doing a rough translation, which don't know how to speak Esperanto certainly will become left behind for this period of history. Now, obviously that didn't happen right away, but maybe happened in the future. And after that, he subsequently declared that Esperanto is not just a language that all followers of Amato should learn, it's actually the language of heaven. And he stepped up religious efforts to spread Esperanto in Japan and internationally. So there's a speech that Onisaburo Deguchi gave, which sums up basically his beliefs regarding Esperanto. And I think it's an excellent little piece. It's only available in Esperanto. So if you can read Esperanto, you can just pause and read it. But I'm going to give a summary in English. So basically, he said there are some board members and some members of the Amato community who are kind of fighting for the use of Japanese as opposed to Esperanto in spreading Amato around the world. And he basically replied saying Japanese is not a language which has like some great hero like Napoleon who's going to go around conquer the world and then spread Japanese. And even if that happened, that only a few people would actually learn Japanese. He said it would actually be better and more in line with the beliefs of Amato if we used a neutral language to spread our scripture, our word as they put it. So that's why he was promoting Esperanto. Now kind of to sum this up, Esperanto still has a very important place in Amato. If anything, it's actually increased in importance. I have a friend who's traveled to Japan a few times and most of the Esperanto speakers he's met there are actually followers of Amato and he stayed in some of their institutions, some of their religious places. So this is a stone that was erected by some of the Amato followers on the 14th of July in 1963. 300 people attended the event presented by the third spiritual guide, Nahoi de Gucci. And it basically says one God, one world, one bridge language. So you can see that this is almost a core belief of Amato. Now I've reached the end of this video. Before I close up, I just wanted to ask you guys your opinion on these types of videos. If you like them, you don't like them. Let me know in the comments. You can even propose ideas that I speak about. So that's it. If you liked this video, like it, share it around sub to the channel. And I'll see you all in the next video. And if you're not there, well, I hope you're reading this book.