Sensei and His People

Sensei and His People: The Building of a Japanese Commune by Yoshie Sugihara and David W. Plath offers a rare and deeply textured account of an alternative community in modern Japan, seen through the lives of its charismatic leader, Ozaki Masutaro, and his followers. Ostracized from the Tenri church as heretics and rejected by their village of origin, Ozaki and a small circle of families built Shinkyo, a commune whose existence embodied both defiance and resilience. Sugihara, Ozaki’s partner and chronicler, narrates the commune’s history from its formative struggles in the 1930s through wartime emigration to Manchuria, postwar return, and eventual consolidation as a thriving collective enterprise. Her account foregrounds the intimate tensions of leadership, devotion, and communal solidarity, while situating Shinkyo against the broader backdrop of Japanese rural life and the national traumas of war, defeat, and reconstruction.

More than a local history, this book reveals how Shinkyo’s communal ideals were rooted in mainstream Japanese values yet tested against the pressures of ostracism, modernization, and political upheaval. Sugihara’s narrative, rendered into English by anthropologist David W. Plath, provides an ethnographic immediacy often absent from conventional sociological studies. Through family histories, anecdotes of ritual and labor, and depictions of ordinary endurance, the text illuminates both the utopian impulses and the pragmatic strategies that enabled a marginal group to survive and flourish. With its combination of biography, ethnography, and memoir, Sensei and His People invites comparisons to American communal experiments such as Oneida, yet insists on the distinctively Japanese texture of paternalistic leadership, farmer virtues, and the reworking of tradition. For scholars of religion, modernization, and comparative communalism, the book offers an unparalleled case study in the lived realities of Japanese social experimentation.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1969.