Issues at the Oversight Council

The Oversight Council (評議員会) of Jinja Honchō (神社本庁) meets twice a year, in May and October, and this year the October meeting was on the 24^th, and reported in the November 3^rd issue of Jinja Shinpō (神社新報).

In recent years, meetings of this council have been dominated by a series of related scandals (the court case and the disputed presidency), but all of those issues have now been resolved, and this has made a difference.

The disputed presidency is still an ongoing issue, because Jinja Honchō is looking into whether it can sue or prosecute the former members of the board of directors who were on the losing side. It was one of the issues raised at the council meeting, because the secretariat presented a report on the current situation, and there were some (OK, quite a lot of) comments on that, and on the actions of the other side. That group has recently sent out a newsletter reiterating its opposition to the current management of Jinja Honchō and its intention to continue its activities. This was sent out in envelopes from the jinja at which one of the current directors is chief priest, and one of the councillors wanted to know if he was involved in the group. He does not appear to have got a straight answer.

Members of the losing group suggested that a third-party committee be set up to look into the problem and recommend steps to prevent something similar happening again. I have no idea what will happen, but the (slightly plaintive, at least in my mind) request from one councillor to please move on from this issue looks unlikely to be met in the near future.

The bright side is that two other issues were raised by councillors. This is good independent of the issues themselves, because the councillors did not do anything active before the crisis, and it would be better for the Shinto community if the Oversight Council were a bit more of a council.

The first issue was that of jinja leaving Jinja Honchō. The report from the secretariat showed that the number of jinja leaving has increased recently (can you think of a possible reason why?), and one of the councillors wanted to know if Jinja Honchō was doing anything about it. The answer from the secretariat was that, legally, they can’t. If a jinja is leaving for technical reasons, then they go through the Prefectural Jinjachō to offer other options, such as merging with another jinja, but if the jinja is leaving for “unclear reasons”, then there is nothing they can do. This got some pushback from councillors, but the secretariat was, unsurprisingly, right about the legal position. Religious corporations like Jinja Honchō are legally forbidden from putting pressure on member corporations that want to leave. They can try to make the benefits of membership obvious, but they cannot make it difficult to get out, or penalise jinja for trying to leave.

The other point was raised in the free discussion period (which used to be a formality at which no-one said anything). A priest noted that, with the increase in foreign tourists visiting jinja, there were a lot of cases of foreign tourists “bulk buying” omamori (he used the Japanese term for “bulk buying”, and it was also in quotation marks in the report — as we all know, you do not buy omamori). He said that he was very concerned about this, and that the priests handing over the omamori should be cautious about it, and Jinja Honchō should issue guidance.

He didn’t say why he was concerned, but the issue I know about in this respect is the possibility that the omamori are being resold. That is wrong on every level from a religious perspective, although there is no way to legally stop it — particularly not in a foreign country. I have suggested to Jinja Honchō that the only way to make a dent in this is to provide ways for foreigners to get hold of omamori legitimately, but that has run into opposition. Foreigners having omamori is not a problem — taking credit cards and putting omamori in the post are.

Still, now that the issue has been formally raised at the Oversight Council, we might see a bit more effort to address it.

In my opinion, these issues are the sort of thing that should be raised at the Oversight Council. As there are unlikely to be fundamental disagreements about the goal (stop jinja leaving Jinja Honchō, stop people reselling omamori), there is even a good chance of constructive discussion leading to a solution. If the long-term effect of the disputed presidency is to turn the Oversight Council into a forum for such discussions, then I think it will, ironically, have proved to be good for Jinja Honchō.