The new series of Komorebi has started, with a new set of authors. (The authors change every two years.) The May 18th issue of Jinja Shinpō included the first column from Ōmichi Haruka, an assistant professor at Kokugakuin University.
She starts by saying that she always finds it difficult to take photographs at jinja and Buddhist temples. She feels that there is something disrespectful about photographing the sacred, whether kami or Buddha, and so she is always a bit reluctant, even though she has permission. She does not think she is the only one (and I am sure she is right about that).
She says that she looked at the restrictions on photography that various jinja gave online. Some are about keeping order in the precincts — restrictions on commercial photography, or going to the jinja simply to film, essentially using it as a set. Others are for safety and privacy reasons. As she says, that sort of restriction is natural. My local post office, for example, has a sign forbidding photography and recording, and that is explicitly for privacy reasons (as it says in multiple languages).
However, jinja also have other restrictions. Two that she mentions, which are common, are restrictions on photographing or filming ceremonies, or on photography of the inside of the sanctuaries. Both of these seem to have religious reasons — these are sacred events or sacred spaces, and they should not be casually filmed.
Prof. Ōmichi then points out one of those things that are blindingly obvious once they have been mentioned. While it now seems natural to think that there is something disrespectful about photographing the sacred, this cannot be an ancient Shinto tradition. It must have arisen within the last 150 years or so. She says that this is a new aspect of religious culture that has arisen in the modern period.
She goes on to say that media do not simply transmit information. Rather, they have the power to define how their objects exist, and to fix the relationship between them and people. This, she says, is why encounters between new forms of media and the sacred often give rise to a feeling that something is wrong.
This feeling of wrongness is, she claims, an explicit manifestation of a religious perception that had previously been latent. By considering this newly explicit religious perception, we decided on whether sacred things could be photographed, and thus created new customs of respect. She thinks that this is also the source of concerns about “virtual sanpai”.
She says that religious culture, which deals with the unseen, can only exist because of media (in the broad sense). It is precisely because they are inseparable that their interaction reveals the fundamentals of religion, and that is why she researches religion through a media lens.
I find this sort of thing fascinating. I think that it is true that new situations — not just involving media — make implicit assumptions explicit, and that this is also true in religion. But I do not think that there is only one way to adapt the existing tradition to the new situation, and there are better and worse choices.
I think Prof. Ōmichi’s column promises to be very interesting.