Uses for Money

A week ago, I wrote about the budget for the Shikinen Sengū — ¥57.7 billion, or about $375 million. One of my readers asked if there weren’t better things to spend that much money on.

The answer has three parts.

First, as far as the Shinto community is concerned, the answer is “No”. The point of Shinto is to perform matsuri for the kami, and the Shikinen Sengū is one of the most important matsuri, the most important according to many. Thus, from the Shinto perspective, there is nothing better to spend the money on.

Second, it is worth looking at what the money is spent on. I don’t have access to the detailed budget, so it is possible that there are some overpaid priests in there, but I doubt it. The money overwhelmingly goes to pay craftspeople who are preserving traditional Japanese crafts. An immediate example is silk production. As I reported a few weeks ago, the Shikinen Sengū is using a lot of domestic silk thread, and there is a crisis in production because almost everyone is importing it. It is entirely possible that, without the Shikinen Sengū, domestic silk production would basically disappear in the next few years. With it, there is a good reason for the last producers to hang on, because there will be demand in a few more years. There are many other similar crafts, as well. The budget also pays for the maintenance of extensive forests, which is important for biodiversity — there are serious problems with abandoned forests across Japan at the moment. It is hard to quantify the impact of the Shikinen Sengū on the preservation of traditional Japanese crafts and building techniques, especially without doing any research at all, but it is clear that it is substantial.

Going beyond the individual crafts, the Shikinen Sengū itself is a tradition that goes back over 1300 years. There are, globally, very few living traditions that old. Thousands of people will participate directly over the next eight years, whether through making things for the process, or ceremonially pulling timber and rocks, or performing matsuri to celebrate the passage of sacred timber. If you include all the people who will just visit Jingū to see what is going on, it will involve millions. If you see value in preserving tradition, then the Shikinen Sengū is worth the money.

The third point is a general one. It is superficially appealing to think that it is not a good idea to spend time and money on one thing when there are other, larger, problems that need solving. This is only superficially appealing, however. It has the consequence that no-one should spend any time or money on pushing for social justice for black people in the USA, because black people in Sudan are in a much worse situation. Similarly, no-one should be working to improve the situation of Japanese women, because Afghan women have it vastly worse. And that’s before you get into the genuinely debatable, and really hard, questions, like whether it is more important to save people starving in Sudan right now, or those in Yemen, or those in Gaza, and whether women’s rights in Afghanistan are of similar importance. On top of that, some people would argue that we ought to do something about the climate crisis, which is a fairly minor problem now, but which will be absolutely critical in a few decades, particularly if the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation does switch off. Do we focus on fixing problems right in front of us now, or try to prevent others from arising?

There are a lot of problems in the world, both immediate and potential, ranging from people starving to death through children with chronic diseases to the risk of loss of traditional cultures. Fortunately, there are also a lot of people in the world, and different people address different problems.

The people supporting the Shikinen Sengū are working to prevent the loss of a traditional culture, and to express the core values of an ancient tradition. I think that this is as good a way of spending the money as any other.