The front page of the April 13th issue of Jinja Shinpō had a report of the annual study meeting of the national association of young Shinto priests. The theme was, roughly, looking at tradition to prepare for the future. That is a very Shinto idea.
The editorial in the same issue picked up on this point, and was rather more radical about it. The opening is conventional enough for the Shinto community. There are certain things that should not change about Shinto practice, and others that can, and indeed should, to adapt to changing circumstances. Priests have to carefully consider all the factors, and distinguish these elements from one another precisely.
Then it (the editorials are unsigned, so I am assuming that they write themselves for pronoun purposes) gets revolutionary. It says that simply distinguishing the elements that can be changed from those that must not will get you nowhere. You have to actually do something new, or the problems will not be solved.
However, it says, when people do something new, there is always opposition. No matter how much the priest making the change has thought about it, and no matter how confident they are that the unchanging heart of Shinto is preserved in this new practice, some people will say that they have abandoned the true path.
The editorial gives the examples of Yoshida Kanetomo, who founded Yoshida Shinto, the dominant tradition from around 1600 to 1868, and Hirata Atsutane, an important figure in Kokugaku, which had a very strong influence on post-1868 Shinto. Both of these people faced criticism from other priests at the time, and both shaped Shinto for decades or centuries, creating the things that became the new traditions. It then says that young priests, who are said to be the vanguard of Shinto, should not hold back from making changes because of fear of criticism.
The editorial closes by expressing the concern that people have got so used to talking about rural depopulation and the ageing society that they have lost any sense of crisis about the issues. Because young priests will still be trying to sustain jinja in twenty years’ time, they are ideally suited to try to solve the problems. They might, it concedes, be immature in some ways, but they also have the energy of youth, and that is what is needed to address the issues.
I have a lot of sympathy with this position. I have mentioned before that Shinto will not survive by simply doing things the way it always has — society has changed too much for that.
I have two concerns. One is with the examples. Yoshida Kanetomo claimed that the sacred object from Isê Jingū had flown to his jinja, and that his jinja was now the place where Amaterasu Ōmikami was enshrined. He also claimed to be the head of the Imperial jinja bureaucracy, without any official appointment from the Tennō.
Yes, he faced criticism. Had the country not been in total chaos due to civil war, he probably would have been legally shut down. I am not sure that he is the best role model.
My other concern is that the editorial did not mention whether the author or Jinja Shinpō would defend priests who were being criticised for doing something new, or whether Jinja Honchō was adopting a general policy of not firing them for it. It did read a little bit as though it was encouraging other people to risk their careers to save Shinto.