The front page of the January 12th issue of Jinja Shinpō carried an article about the visit of Prime Minister Takaichi and eleven cabinet ministers to pay their respects at Isë Jingū on the 5th. After visiting the Outer and Inner Sanctuaries, they offered kagura (which is the Jingū version of a formal prayer, gokitō), and Takaichi gave a press conference at the Jingū office. In the press conference, she summarised her plans as prime minister, and affirmed the significance of the Shikinen Sengū.
This is a tradition. As I understand it, just about every post-war prime minister has done it, the only exception being due to the pandemic. Even the Catholic prime minister did it.
It is not really controversial within Japan, in the way that visits to Yasukuni Jinja are. Given that the objection to those visits is normally phrased in terms of the separation between the state and religion, this is, on the face of it, odd. The prime minister paid her respects with her cabinet and gave a press conference as prime minister, so any claim that she was there purely as a private individual would be a bit difficult to sustain. A few people do, indeed, complain about this, but most Japanese have no problem with it.
Why?
I think there are two reasons.
First, Isë Jingū does not enshrine war criminals, nor does it have a close association with the war. It enshrines the ancestral kami of the Tennō, but the Tennō still has a constitutionally established role in the state. There is nothing obviously problematic about the jinja itself, and it is, in some sense, an obvious one for the prime minister to visit.
Second, it’s hatsumōdë. Everyone does hatsumōdë. It makes sense for the prime minister to do it as well.
Most Japanese people do not see this jinja visit as problematically religious because, I think, they do not see their own hatsumōdë as religious, nor those of their neighbours. Indeed, given that Catholic prime ministers have also done it, it is quite likely that many of the prime ministers have not seen it as religious either. And if a practice is not seen as religious by the people doing it, or by the mainstream of the culture in which it is embedded, then I think we should say that it is not religious. If someone, particularly from outside the culture, has a standard on which it is religious, then I think we should say that that standard is not applicable to this culture and this practice — and, if it is supposed to be universal, it is wrong.
An interesting note arises from one of the questions asked at the press conference. Apparently, Takaichi took a photograph of Abë Shinzō, the assassinated former prime minister, with her, and took it out on the bridge to show him the scenery. She said that she wanted to bring him to Jingū one more time.
Abë was Takaichi’s mentor, and so this is appropriate. The implications for beliefs about the dead are, however, interesting.