The 29th September issue of Jinja Shinpō carried a second article connected to me, this one about one of the projects I have worked on at Jinja Honchō. This is a poster explaining basic manners for visiting a jinja.
With the massive increase in foreign tourists in Japan, this has become a bit of a problem. The events that get a lot of publicity are things like influencers doing chin-ups on torii, but the things that become a real issue are more subtle. I mean, most reasonable people realise that the torii are not exercise equipment. On the other hand, it is not obvious to tourists that you should not go into the prayer hall — the doors are open, and you go into churches, right? And a lot of people see no problem with sitting on the steps to eat and drink. However, this sort of behaviour upsets the priests, in part because they don’t want to come on heavy and unwelcoming — but you mustn’t just wander into the buildings. You have to be purified first.
So, we decided to make a simple poster that could be put up at the entrance to jinja to let people know the basics.
The first problem was that we really did not want it to be full of prohibitions. We want to be welcoming. The simplest part of that was entitling the whole poster “Welcome to this Jinja”, but we also designed it so that the first row of instructions is all things you should do, like purify yourself, pay your respects, enjoy the precincts, and respect the sacred site. Then we got onto the things you shouldn’t do, like climb on the koma-inu, fly drones, or take photos of people without their permission.
Once we had decided on the content, we contracted an illustrator (a real person!) to produce small illustrations for each instruction. For example, we have a small drone flying through a torii with a prohibited mark over the top. My personal favourite is the “don’t photograph miko” panel, because the miko looks really discombobulated.
We went through extensive discussions of the details of the images. This included things like moving a person over a bit so that they weren’t walking along the middle of the sandō (the sacred path), or changing the people paying their respects so that they were all at different points of the process, and didn’t look like a group. We didn’t mention not walking on the centre of the sandō, because it is not a high priority, but we didn’t want to show it either, and having apparently unconnected people paying their respects at the same time hints that you can do that, which might speed up the queue a bit.
Another topic we spent quite a lot of time on was gender and ethnic diversity. Gender was relatively straightforward — there is a rough balance of male and female figures, and we distributed them to avoid suggesting that particular sorts of behaviour were associated with men or women. Ethnic diversity was more of an issue. The illustrations are not photorealistic, so it is a little hard to depict diversity sensitively. And then there is the issue of the bad behaviour. The final decision was to make the good boys and girls (that is, the people doing the things we encourage at the top of the poster) obviously ethnically diverse, but the naughty children (OK, so they aren’t depicted as children) all look potentially Japanese. Because it is not as if Japanese people never do these things… And by doing it this way, we avoid subliminally suggesting that it is only foreigners causing problems. This was actually a suggestion from my colleagues at Jinja Honchō, rather than from me.
The bottom of the poster has a QR code that takes you straight to Jinja Honchō’s new page about the etiquette for visiting a jinja, which provides the detail on paying your respects that would not fit on the poster.
If you are a jinja, you can get a copy of the poster for the price of postage by contacting the publicity department at Jinja Honchō. You can also download a printable file from the private site for priests. Jinja Honchō had already publicised it through the Prefectural Jinjachō, but the article in Jinja Shinpō might bring it to the attention of even more jinja.
I’m afraid I can’t put a picture of the poster up in this article, because apparently the contract with the illustrator doesn’t cover that. I have yet to see one “in the wild”, either, but I hear that there have been quite a lot of requests for it, so I think I might in the near future.
Regarding “sitting on the steps”, I agree that this is bad manner. However, not only on the grounds of the jinja, but also in most other public spaces in Japan there is a lack of benches or other places to take a rest.
This is true, although my impression is that it is less true than it was ten or twenty years ago. On the other hand, there are a lot more tourists than there were ten or twenty years ago, so the pressure on the benches is no less.