Revd Tagawa continued her account of her career in the March 17th issue of Jinja Shinpō. (Yes, I know I’m way behind. The hatsumōdë survey took up a lot of posts.) That entry takes up the story two years after she qualified as a priest, when she was serving at Imari Jinja while another priest was acting chief priest at her family jinja of Fukumo Hachimangū.
Her mother had always said that you should stick to something new for three years to ensure that you really understood what it involved, and then decide what to do, so Revd Tagawa’s plan was to serve at Imari Jinja for three years, and then assess the situation. However, when she had been there for two years, the acting chief priest came to her and said that he (statistically likely, and helps keep them straight) would like her to take over. At first, she wanted to wait at least another year, but when she attended the annual matsuri and saw that the acting chief priest was having trouble kneeling, she decided that she could not ask him to continue.
So, she took over as chief priest, but did not stop serving at Imari Jinja. Although she tried to be at Fukumo Hachimangū as much as possible on her days off, the sōdai and ujiko were commenting that, even though she was the chief priest, she was never there. This put pressure on her, as did the general responsibilities of being a chief priest.
As a result, at this time, she was under a lot of stress. She was clenching her jaw all the time, and then she came out in a rash. When that cleared up, she suffered intestinal inflammation and couldn’t eat properly, so she lost a lot of weight. Then she reacted to an allergen, suffered anaphylactic shock, and was hospitalised. This was three years after she became a priest, and one year after she became chief priest — she was 25.
She decided that she couldn’t handle serving at two jinja, and so resigned from Imari Jinja to concentrate on her home jinja. Even so, relations with the chief priest at Imari Jinja remained good — last year, she was unable to serve at the main festival of Fukumo Hachimangū, and asked him to serve in her place. He agreed, and took care to do the job well. She says that she has a great deal of respect for him as a model priest.
When she became chief priest, the chief priest of Imari Jinja gave her some advice. “Don’t become full of yourself because you have become a chief priest by descent. You become chief priest because the kami chose you, not of your own will. It is important to always serve the kami as chief priest with the sense that you could be unchosen at any time.”
The Shinto priesthood is obviously not easy, but I would like to fill in a couple of bits of background. First, if you graduate from one of the Shinto universities (as she did), you have the rank of Seikai, which is raised to Meikai when you have two years of service. Meikai is a fully qualified priest — you can be chief priest of any jinja, even the largest, and the only higher rank is an honorary one, given for long and distinguished service. Thus, it is probably not a coincidence that this is when the acting chief priest came to her.
Second, the reason why she wanted to continue at Imari Jinja is likely to be partially financial. It is unlikely that Fukumo Hachimangū had enough income to support a full-time priest at that point. The stresses of priestly life are sometimes entirely mundane.