Ujigamisama no Konsarutanto

Ujigamisama no Konsarutanto (Ujigami-sama’s Consultant) is a recent manga that is currently complete in three volumes. The link is an affiliate link to Amazon Japan, but the manga is only available in Japanese, and unlikely to do well in translation.

That is because the manga is about the efforts of the heir of a priestly family to revitalise the jinja. I came across it because a priest wrote an article in Jinja Shinpō saying that it was very good, and recommending that people read it.

It is, and I do. The main character is a high school girl who works part-time as a miko. She also seems to have been living alone since losing her parents in a traffic accident at the age of twelve, so that part of the manga is not terribly realistic, but the rest of it is. The author has clearly done her research, and is familiar with both the problems facing jinja, and the solutions that they try.

This post contains some spoilers, but the plot is not driven by twists and the unexpected.

Sakura Masumi is the (adopted) daughter of a jinja family, and at the beginning of the manga she is in the first year of high school, and looking after Kiyota Jinja following the deaths of her parents. She cleans, and makes the daily offerings, but the priest is Revd Shioda, a typical priest (he is old and male) who has responsibility for a lot of jinja. He is resident at Shimazu Jinja, which is fairly prosperous, and not too far away. Kiyota Jinja is the main jinja of Kiyota City, but redevelopment has shifted the centre of gravity, and a lot of ujiko have lost their links to the jinja. Very few people come to pay their respects, and the city wants to take over the land to build a new civic hall.

One day, a Mysterious Consultant, calling himself Hakamada, turns up, and starts offering Masumi advice on how to get more people involved with the jinja again. (The mystery turns out to be entirely mundane. In fact, there is nothing supernatural in the manga at all.) The plot concerns what she does with that advice.

The manga is optimistic, and a jinja would have to be very lucky to have the process go as well as it does at Kiyota Jinja, but all the suggestions are realistic, practical, and have precedents at real jinja. One of the good features of the manga is that there are three priests involved (four once Masumi qualifies), all with slightly different views on how jinja should adapt to the modern world, which means that the debates in the Shinto community also get an airing. Hakamada is a bit too business-oriented, and so Masumi often has to at least reframe his ideas in ways that are suitable for a jinja.

Priests reading this manga would get some practical ideas for things they could do at their jinja, assuming that they were in a regional town or city, rather than a depopulated rural village. Non-priests would get a good idea of the problems facing contemporary jinja. And the whole thing is heart-warming, as there are no villains, just people with different goals. If you can read Japanese, I recommend it. If you are learning to read Japanese, and read this blog, I recommend it — the Japanese is not hard, and there are furigana on the non-standard words. (Not on everything — it isn’t aimed at young children.) If you can’t read Japanese and aren’t learning, then this isn’t for you.