Shorinji Kempo
Shorinji Kempo was originated in 1947 in the Japanese town of Tadotsu, by So Doshin. He had faced Japan's defeat at the end of the Second World War in what was then called Manchuria (now the Northeast Region of China). Fleeing from the invading Russians, he experienced the wretchedness and sorrow of a defeated people. He realized that in such times it was not ideology, religion, or ethics, but rather the interests of nations and peoples that took priority, and the harsh reality that international government at that time operated power as was all that constituted righteousness.
Amidst that experience, Kaiso saw that law and government worked not just according to distinctions of ideology or religion, or of national policy, but that a great difference could be made by the character and way of thinking of the individual in a specific position of authority. What he realized was that "everything depends on the quality of the person."
Kaiso returned to a Japan in turmoil after the war. He found that peoples' spirits were at an all time low. In order to put his beloved country back on the right course, he resolved to dedicate his life to educating the youth to instill the spirit and the backbone that the country so desperately needed. Because it was the youth who would take care of the future, he had them train both indomitable spirits and sturdy bodies and gave them confidence and courage. He cultivated many leaders who would help rebuild Japan. To construct a world in which everyone could live in happiness, he took both the Chinese and Japanese martial arts that he had studied and reformulated them into a single, unique technical structure, thus originating Shorinji Kempo.
Much of what Kaiso created used the Buddha's teaching of building ones self and Boddhidharma's teaching of an indestructible and indomitable spirit to make the foundation of Kongo Zen, and he located Shorinji Kempo within Kongo Zen as its primary discipline.
In April of 1948, Tadotsu's famous flower viewing site, Toryo Park, was filled with flower viewing visitors. Drunken people at flower viewing parties getting into fights over the slightest offense were regular daily events, but this fight was not just a quarrel among townfolk, but was apparently a dispute involving gangsters. It appeared that some unrelated townspeople were about to get sucked into the violence. But, since the opponents were gangsters, there was no one who could stop it. If one carelessly tried to jump in and stop things, he could be wounded.
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