Recently, there have been a couple of articles in Jinja Shinpō about the digital transformation, and specifically cashless offerings. The first, in the 5th May issue, reported a study group held by Saitama Prefectural Jinjachō. This group had four presentations, by a member of the Jinjachō staff, a tax accountant, and two priests at jinja that were already accepting cashless offerings.
For the most part, they raised the issues that I have mentioned in earlier posts on this topic (see the tag). The tax accountant did confirm that simply using cashless systems does not change the tax status of a transaction — if it is a donation in the first place, it is still a donation if completed electronically. This makes sense, but making sense does not guarantee that tax regulations work that way. It is good to know that they do.
The Jinjachō member raised an issue that I have not seen mentioned before, that of data collection. The company handling the transactions automatically gets information on who is donating how much to which jinja, which is something people might not want them to be aware of.
One of the priests, from Kumano Jinja in Kawagoë, explained that they were using J Coin Pay, offered by Mizuho Bank (one of the three biggest banks in Japan) for the offertory box. It has advantages, including the fact that there is no transaction fee. It also has disadvantages, mainly the fact that few people have heard of it and even fewer use it. This is an issue — it is almost certainly impractical for most jinja to manage multiple systems.
The other priest, from Kanda Myōjin in Tokyo, said that they had introduced cashless things everywhere! I paraphrase. As I have mentioned before, Kanda Myōjin is the Ujigami-sama for Akihabara, and has had two chief priests in succession who have been very active in trying new things to adapt to modern society. So much so that they do risk going too far — but somebody has to, if we are going to find out where “too far” is, and Kanda Myōjin is ideally placed to be the guinea pig.
Anyway, they take the IC cards used for trains and buses, J Coin Pay for the offertory box, online bookings for New Year gokitō, with credit card or bank transfer payment, payment by card for on-site gokitō bookings and omamori etc, and mobile orders for omamori etc. I’m not exactly sure what the last one is, but it probably involves smartphones. They also offer omamori online, but not all of them.
They said that this made things a lot easier, particularly for foreign visitors, but on the downside there were transaction fees, terminal maintenance fees, increased transaction times, and the need to train staff to operate the system.
The representative of the Jinjachō mentioned an interesting survey that had been done at a couple of important jinja in Kyoto. According to this, while people had no problems using cashless systems to make offerings for omamori or ofuda, a lot of people did not like using it for the offertory box. This fits with the “purification” interpretation of that offering, which only works if you actually throw something into the box, while the offerings for omamori and ofuda are simply offerings, and the form does not matter. It is interesting that ordinary visitors to jinja seem to make the distinction.
The second article was in the May 12th issue, and reported that Jinja Honchō’s committee looking into these questions had largely finalised its report, which would be submitted soon. The article gave no details about the content, but this makes sense — I hope there will be an article about the report, saying what it concluded. If not, I will try to get a copy of the report itself, as it would not make much sense for it to be confidential.