The Sun That Lights The Graphical Interfaces		Português

NAO DEGUCHI
A Biography of the Foundress of Oomoto

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Chapter One

Adoption Into the Deguchi Family

       In countries where ancestor worship is indigenous to the culture, a barren marriage produces a peculiar critial situation. If you have no children, who is going to sweep your grave and honor your tablet on the family altar after you are gone? If you have only daughters, they are going to marry and undertake such duties only in their husbands' families, and your problem is equally acute. In Japan adoption is the commonest solution to such a dilemma. If you can not have children of your own, you are forced to adopt some child from a more distant branch of the family or even from outside the family in order to insure that after you have passed on, there will be someone of your own family name to carry out these essential rites. Spirit entities that lack such support from the world of mortals are believed to become extremely vangeful ghosts afflicting their former families with illness and misfortune of various kinds. Therefore it is of great concern to the entire family that the ancestors be properly placated.

In Soyo's home town of Ayabe there lived a man named Masagorô Deguchi. Having no children of his own, he adopted a certain young man called Masahei, who married Soyo's younger sister Yuriko. Unfortunately Masahei died without leaving any children, and Yuriko begged Soyo to allow her to adopt Nao into the Deguchi family to continue the family line and so serve the ancestral spirits.

In 1853, when she was sixteen, Nao was adopted by Yuriko in Ayabe, but she did not get along with her aunt, and after six months she went back to her mother in Fukuchiyama. One day the following year, Yuriko, desperate to continue the Deguchi family line, came to the Kirimuras' house and threatened to haunt them after her death unless Nao came back to the Deguchi family. That evening, Yuriko drowned herself in a well.

At the time, a certain Giemon from a community near Fukuchiyama was seeking Nao's hand in marriage, and Nao seemed in favor of the arrangement. After suffering a serious illness, however, Nao, terrified by her aunt's threat, resigned herself to going to Ayabe. So, in 1855, at the age of eighteen, Nao returned to the Deguchi family. In the same year, the Deguchis adopted a certain Toyosuke Shikata, who changed his name to the family name of Masagorô Deguchi, and he and Nao were married on the 20th of March.

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The Foundress' Husband

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Last modified on August 5, 1999

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Marcelo Ghelman