Yesterday, I went to my local jinja, Shirahata Hachiman Daijin, to pray that my daughter will pass her university entrance exams. (Her first one is on Sunday.) She didn’t go; she was too busy studying.
This is, in general, normal. Not that I’ve ever done it before, but then my daughter has never taken university entrance exams before.
First, praying for success in exams is normal. I don’t know percentages, but pretty much every jinja has omamori for exam success, and jinja that have a reputation for such requests, particularly those enshrining Tenjin-sama (Sugawara no Michizanë), get very busy around this time of year. I would say that this is one of the three life events that is most often marked by a Shinto ceremony in Japan, the others being birth and becoming three, five, or seven.
The other two have formally recognised ceremonies attached to them (hatsumiyamairi and shichigosan respectively), but entrance exams do not. People just have a regular gokitō (formal prayer), or ask for an omamori. I think there are two reasons for this. One is that this is, as far as I know, a post-war phenomenon. Before the war, most people did not take entrance exams, because they did not continue their education past the compulsory level. That changed after the war, with virtually everyone going to high school (which is not compulsory, and so there are exams) and a large proportion going to university. A few decades is not really long enough to establish a “traditional ceremony”.
The second reason is that the person taking the exams often does not go in person, because they are too busy studying. Which brings us to the second thing that is normal: praying on behalf of someone else. I would say this is a minority overall, in that most people go in person, but parents praying for their children, or grandparents for their grandchildren, is absolutely standard. That should not really be a surprise, of course — it is something you find in a lot of cultures. But even for a formal prayer, the subject of the request does not need to be there. Exam success is an unusual example where the subject may not be there for most of the prayers.
Historically, prayers by proxy may have been even more common, because it was harder to travel to jinja. I have mentioned before that groups of people venerating a particular major jinja often pooled funds to send one member of the group with everyone’s request.
Apart from reduced travel times, the advantage to doing these prayers at your local jinja is that the kami knows you, and is not absolutely swamped with similar requests. (No, that is not official Shinto theology.)
You know I forgot about this? I ought to go pray for my kids as well, as they try to conquer kanji. ^^
Hope all went well. Over the years, I have been to a couple of Jinja with reputations for “helping” in passing university exams. All seem to have very shiny bronze statues, that have been rubbed for good luck by countless generations of kids.
They are very shiny oxen, aren’t they.