The 28 April issue of Jinja Shinpō included the annual article about the employment of newly qualified priests. I have been writing about these since 2017.
One notable change this year was a substantial fall in the number of people qualifying as priests: a drop of 26 to 136 at Kokugakuin University, and of 24 to 66 at Kōgakkan University. The majority of these students were on four year courses, which means that these people entered university in 2021, at the height of the pandemic. This drop probably says nothing about longer term trends.
The proportion of students going on to serve at jinja has dropped since last year, by 6.1 percentage points to 75.2%, but this is still high. Kokugakuin was notified of 368 vacancies at 218 jinja, while Kōgakkan was notified of 356 vacancies at 189 jinja. Because, as always, a lot of the newly qualified priests went to serve at jinja run by family or friends, Kokugakuin filled 64 vacancies, and Kōgakkan 51. The shortage of priests is still obviously critical, which makes one wonder why almost 25% did not go to serve at jinja. (There is a separate category for people who get a “normal” job and work as a priest on the side. This is a common choice if your family (set of) jinja has little money, because it enables you to secure a pension that will let you serve as chief priest after you retire.)
There also seems to have been no major shift in gender proportions. At Kokugakuin, 50 of the students were female (37%), and at Kōgakkan there were 22 women (33%). At Kokugakuin, 34 women went on to serve at jinja, which means that the proportion of women going on to serve was slightly lower than that for men. At Kōgakkan, however, 19 of the women went to serve at jinja, or 86% — that is higher than the proportion for men. That does include women who go to serve as miko rather than priests, but this is a viable career path, particularly if you are from a priestly family.
The year-to-year variations are probably not large enough to be significant, although the proportion of women is higher this year than last. Kokugakuin commented that women were determined to serve as priests, and that jinja were becoming more positive about accepting them, and Kōgakkan placed a very high proportion of female students. Jinja Shinpō is still publishing death notices for chief priests who had held that post since before I was born, so it will take a long time for the change in proportions to work through the system, but I do expect it to happen. An interesting question is why the ratio of men to women at the universities is still about two to one. There is certainly no such bias among young people active in Shinto as lay people — if anything, the imbalance is the other way. It would be interesting to look into this.
Both universities commented that the trend to serving at jinja across Japan, not just in major cities, continues. Kōgakkan commented that a lot of people go to serve in the prefecture where they were born, or one of the adjacent prefectures. There was a serious problem with new priests avoiding rural areas when I first wrote about these data, but that seems to have been solved now.
The only substantial problem now is the simplest: there aren’t enough new priests.