Starting from March 1, 1898, he followed a hermit called Matsuoka Fuyō (松岡芙蓉), who was a messenger of the kami Kono-hana-saku-ya-hime-no-mikoto (木花咲耶姫命), to a cave on Mount Takakuma near Kameoka, Kyoto, where Onisaburo performed intense ascetic training for one week.

While enduring cold weather with only a cotton robe, as well as hunger and thirst, Onisaburo received divine revelations and claimed to have traveled into the spirit world.

In 1924, retired naval captain Yutaro Yano and his associates within the Black Dragon Society invited Onisaburo on a journey to Mongolia.

Ikki Kita had previously been sent to China by the Black Dragon Society and had proposed in for Esperanto to be the only language spoken in the Empire of Japan.

A believer in the Oomoto maxim that it was humanity's duty to move forward together, bringing about a new age of existence on Earth, Onisaburo went to great lengths to promote the syncretic faith preached by Nao Deguchi.

Throughout his life, Onisaburo was often quite flamboyant, taking delight in wearing richly textured costumes of his own design and posing as a wide variety of deities, mostly Buddhist or Shinto.