At the beginning of every year, Jinja Shinpō publishes a lot of short articles by people connected with the Shinto community who were born in the same year of the Chinese zodiac as the current year. A few are invited, particularly 96-year-olds who are up to writing something, but I think most are submitted. Almost all the writers are priests, but not all — they published the one I wrote in the last year of the boreboar. This year is the year of the horse. Because the authors can write about whatever they want, the articles tend to be much more diverse than the standard run of pieces in Jinja Shinpō.
That diversity was what really struck me about the articles in the January 12th issue, which covered the best part of two pages of the newspaper. Two of them really capture the range.
One was by a male priest who will be 72 this year. Early in his career, when he was serving at Minatogawa Jinja in Hyōgo Prefecture, he was advised to move to Nogi Jinja in Tokyo. There, he was put in charge of the “kaikan”, which is the building where events, such as wedding receptions, are held. This meant that he spent his weekdays going around department stores, major corporations, and wedding planners in Tokyo, trying to get their business. This occasionally led to him playing golf with important people, or spending the evening in Ginza, Akasaka, or Roppongi. This was the 80s, when the Japanese bubble economy was in full swing, and people were spending enormous amounts on weddings. In this booming market, he put together wedding plans that made the jinja enormous amounts of money. Looking back, he says he learned a lot from meeting presidents of large corporations, devising business plans, and helping design the menus and such for the weddings. From the end of the 90s, he took on the same role at Atsuta Jingū in Nagoya, and then, after a period as a senior officer at Hyōgo Prefectural Jinjachō, he became the chief priest of a rural jinja in that prefecture, where he serves while running his private farming and forestry.
The other was by a female priest who is coming up to 48. She has been the chief priest of her jinja in Shimanë Prefecture, one of the most depopulated prefectures in Japan, for twelve years, since her father died. She is the youngest of three daughters, so she did not expect to inherit the role, but that jinja has now been passed to the youngest child for four consecutive generations. She is actually the chief priest of five jinja, but she also serves at the local Gokoku Jinja (Shimanë is one of the prefectures that has two), which indicates that the five jinja together do not make enough money to support one full-time priest. She notes that she is concerned about whether it will be possible to continue the ceremonies in the future, given the falling population of the area.
These two appear to have very little in common, beyond both being priests. But they are both priests, and within the Shinto community, neither is more a priest than the other. Shinto is a very broad church, as the saying goes.