Depopulation Survey

On August 8^th, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport, and Tourism published a survey on depopulation, and Jinja Shinpō published an article about it in the 1^st September issue. (Yes, I have got a bit behind.) While this is not directly about Shinto, it is of great interest to many priests, as this is the most pressing threat to the survival of jinja across Japan. Put briefly, it is very hard for a jinja to survive if no-one lives nearby.

The survey was about “shūraku” (集落), which is a term indicating a group of homes in a fairly well-defined area. The natural translation might be “village”, but that is the standard translation for “mura” (村), which is an administrative term, and a mura often includes multiple shūraku. This is even more true for administrative towns and cities in rural areas. To take an example I know personally, Ishinomaki City in Miyagi Prefecture covers almost the whole of the Oshika Peninsula (part of the peninsula is in Onagawa Town), but most of the peninsula is forested mountains, and there are multiple settlements — shūraku — in the bays along the coast. These bays are separated by mountains, so the shūraku are separate for practical purposes, even if they are part of the same “city”. (Incidentally, this is why you will get an absurdly inflated number if you try to determine how much of Japan is urban by looking at the area or population of “cities”. They cover a lot of rural areas.)

The headline from the survey was that, between 2019 and 2023, 296 shūraku had lost their entire populations. That sounds a lot, but there were a total of 78,485 shūraku in the area covered by the survey, so this is not a high proportion. On the other hand, a lot of the shūraku are very small, with more than half having fewer than 100 inhabitants, and about a sixth with under 25. While “small but stable” is theoretically possible, the facts that about a fifth of shūraku have no-one under 15 living there, and that for over 70% the proportion is less than 10%, show that these places are not stable. There are 1,541 shūraku where the youngest inhabitant is at least 65.

Looking to the future, 488 shūraku are expected to lose their whole population within ten years, and 3,324 are expected to become empty at some point. On the other hand, the last survey, five years ago, predicted that 499 shūraku would depopulate completely in ten years, and only 63 had done so as of this survey. This suggests that the predictions may be a bit pessimistic, but even so the population is expected to fall in 85% of shūraku, and just short of a quarter are already in a position where they are not really functioning as a community.

The survey specifically asked what had happened to jinja and Buddhist temples in the shūraku that no longer had any residents. Eighty six did not answer, and 149 (just over half) said that there were no jinja or temples in the shūraku. In 20 cases, 6.8%, the jinja or temples were being supported by former residents, and in 5 cases, 1.7%, they were being supported by residents of a different shūraku. Thirty six, 12.2%, had just been abandoned. This is, of course, the situation that the Shinto community is specifically worried about.

One telling response was from the administrative units — cities, towns, or villages — responsible for the shūraku. About 60% said that there were shūraku within their jurisdiction that were at risk of disappearing, but that they were not doing anything particular about it. This is much more likely to reflect a lack of resources and legal framework than a simple lack of concern, but it is also possible that they simply cannot see what to do.

This is even more true for the Shinto community, which seems to be concentrating its efforts on communities that still have a significant number of children, at least judging from the articles in Jinja Shinpō. This is why I think it is inevitable that we will lose a significant number of jinja over the next few decades, and also why I do not think that fact tells us anything about the general Japanese attitude to jinja and Shinto.