ABSTRACT
Shinkyô is a commune, founded in the mid-1930s in Kasama, a village outside Haibara, Nara Prefecture. David Plath (1966) and Christoph Brumann (1996) have already elegantly discussed Shinkyô against the general background of other utopian communities within Japan, and Plath especially focused on its key founder, Ozaki Masutarô sensei, to illustrate traditional images of leadership. I have been friends with Shinkyô members and visited it regularly over the past 20 years, but have spoken about it very little and written about it even less; although I have often taken friends and students there, to learn for themselves.1
