Deep into the Shinnyo Spiritual World

Shinnyo-en (Garden of the Truth) is one of the most famous religious groups in Japan today. But outside Shinnyo-en it is difficult to understand Shinnyo teaching. By focusing on the words from interviews, this article depicts its spiritual world and analyzes the function of its spiritual power on interviewees. The believers' narrative is interpreted from a sociological perspective using computer-aided qualitative data analysis and a life history approach. The computer-aided coding method is found to be an effectual means to discover significant factors in Shinnyo teachings. This method has four steps: (1) interview transcripts are input in ASCII format in several groups according to the time we interviewed; (2) KT2 system, a set of programs for computerized content analysis, disaggregates the transcripts into words to which I assign codes; (3) the codes are integrated into several meaningful categories for a cross-tabular examination of two variables, times and categories; (4) a contour map made from the cross-table helps to grasp the significance of the categories and their relations in a life history. This procedure enables us to understand the significance of the self, and the transformation of the self according to the time flows. The contour map of the belief commands a panoramic view of Shinnyo teaching. From this point of view we can scrutinize the interview data and describe the Shinnyo spiritual world as it is understood.