2.Return to the fondly remembered home country
In mid-June of 1946, the group of returnees led by Kaiso arrived in the port of Nagasaki. This was the fondly remembered land of their home country. However, though they did indeed step onto their native soil, it had been laid waste by the fires of war, and people had completely forgotten both morals and fellow feeling: fellow Japanese fought with each other, and injustice and violence prevailed in broad daylight. A hellish world unfolded in front of the returnees where the strong ate and the weak became the meat. Japan had been smashed to ruins, and Kaiso wanted to put the country back on its feet. He thought, "The primary reason this is happening is that the Japanese people have lost their spiritual foundation." Wanting "people to restore their pride in themselves as Japanese," he began preaching on the Way.
In Japan at that time, even food was scarce, and there was almost no commercial entertainment. The town was ruined, there were violent gangs in both the town of Tadotsu and the neighboring city of Marugame, and gangsters strutted about town. Young gang members would brazenly take the youth they encountered into toilet rooms or other hidden places and take from them their money, watches and the like in a practice known as "katsuage." People had their money extorted, and sometimes they would be beaten, but they lacked the strength to resist and always had to simply cry themselves to sleep. Kaiso called to some youths like this in his neighborhood by saying, "How about I teach you the keys to fighting," and began explaining the Way.
However, it was perhaps an uphill battle to take youths who had gathered because they wanted to get better at fighting to listen and try to get them to set their minds to listening to sermons. The few students who gathered around Kaiso at that time all quit going to Kaiso's dojo.
How was he to have people gather, and how could he get them to keep coming long term? For Kaiso, this was the first setback after he began to expound the Way.
One of those evenings, Kaiso dreamt of Dharuma. "In the dream, I thought he was saying, 'Follow me!' and from that hint I originated Shorinji Kempo."
Dharuma Daishi was the indefatigable and indomitable person who, after a long and arduous journey, arrived from India at China's Mt. Song (Songshan), and there he taught the Shaolin Temple monks both the teachings of Zen and the martial arts. That teaching and that martial art are drawn vividly as somehow melded into a single thing in the mural at the White Robe Hall at Mount Song Shaolin Temple.
This painting was made in the Qing dynasty and is still maintained now, as before, at the Mt. Song Shaolin Temple , and it is called the Picture of Arahan Practice. In it, many monks are paired up and throwing themselves into practice. Amidst their earnestness, their pleasure at applying techniques on each other communicates itself naturally in the mural.
Until he saw this image at the Shaolin Temple while he was working during the war, Kaiso had thought of martial arts as a more harshly fierce endeavor. To put it as forcefully in extreme terms, he had thought that wounding and killing each other was the fate of martial arts. The grandfather who had taught martial arts to Kaiso, Juen So, had incited Kaiso while instructing him in kendo by saying, "Think of me as your parent's blood enemy and attack!" He said that if it were for one's own progress, you should even think of your parents and siblings as enemies. When faced with the sight of the mural, so vastly removed from Kaiso's sense to that point of martial arts, he received an unexpected shock at the Mt. Song Shaolin Temple.
The "keys to fighting" that Kaiso had been teaching to the youth were indeed based on the essence of the Japanese martial arts and the various techniques he had trained in in China. However, they were never more than "keys to fighting," and they did not overlap with the humane Way that he had been teaching. "That's right, I'll follow Dharuma. The core truths of teachings and techniques that Dharuma brought to China, I can restore them to life here in Japan." Along these lines, Kaiso re-organized the Chinese techniques and Japanese budo he had learned, and gathered people while teaching these techniques, and he explained the teachings of building oneself and about the teachings of indefatigable and indomitable spirit. This was the birth of Shorinji Kempo as a discipline, and its real start at building up people.