Children’s Activities at Jinja

There was an interesting article on the back page of the June 15^th issue of Jinja Shinpō, about educational activities for children being held at jinja. I think this is a delayed response to an installment of a regular column some months ago, in which the author asked why jinja weren’t doing this sort of thing. In his next column, he said that he had been contacted by priests who were doing that sort of thing, and apologised for his ignorance.

This is, of course, an inevitable side effect of having 80,000 independent jinja. Even if you read Jinja Shinpō religiously, you only know about what’s going on at the jinja who write articles for it, and even if people were a lot more active in doing that, there simply isn’t space to cover all 80,000, or even the 15,000 or so that have resident chief priests. (If 300 jinja submitted one article per year, that would take up a page every week. So, if every jinja with a chief priest submitted one article per year, each weekly issue of Jinja Shinpō would have to be fifty pages long, rather than six. No-one would have time to read it all.)

This article covers “Terakoya at Jinja”. Terakoya (寺子屋) were local private schools in the Edo period (1603–1868), and at least by the end of the period they seem to have been very widespread — European visitors in the mid-to-late nineteenth century remarked on how many people in Japan, even women of the lowest social classes, were literate, and that was due to terakoya. The “tera” means a Buddhist temple, but apparently they were often associated with jinja. The name is still known in contemporary Japan, and these activities use it because they are focused on Japanese traditional culture.

The article introduces terakoya at three jinja.

The first is Minatogawa Jinja (湊川神社), in Hyōgō Prefecture. This was founded at the very beginning of the Meiji period to enshrine a fourteenth century warrior (Kusunoki Masashigë — 楠木正成) who was loyal to the Tennō. The terakoya teaches children about the Tennō, the kami of the jinja, and its festivals, as well as Japanese etiquette, calligraphy, and traditional poem composition. Once per year, they have a performance of gagaku (雅楽), the traditional music currently played at jinja.

The second is Osaka Gokoku Jinja (大阪護國神社), where the priest said that the kami of that jinja had died for the future children of Japan, and so would be delighted to have them running around the precincts shouting. (I paraphrase. Very slightly.) The activities here involve singing the national anthem in front of a rock of the type mentioned in it, and once a year having a session with sumo wrestlers, which is apparently very popular.

The third is Hiraoka Jinja (枚岡神社), near Osaka, where it involves practical activities such as lighting fires with a friction drill (ritually significant in Shinto), planting and harvesting rice in the jinja’s sacred rice field, and making shimenawa ropes from rice straw.

The article closes with an appeal for priests who are thinking about doing something similar to get in touch, because the author is associated with an organisation that supports these activities.

The opening of the article is striking. It starts with complaints about the occupying Americans “ripping the wings” off the Japanese through their War Guilt Information Program, and by stopping the use of the Imperial Rescript on Education in schools. This is a conventional right-wing position. But it goes on to say that the centralising policies of the Meiji government destroyed the sacred forests that had been cherished in the regions of Japan for centuries, even millennia. This is not a conventional right-wing position — they tend to think that the Meiji period was wonderful in every respect.

In any case, I think jinja are a very appropriate place to teach children traditional Japanese culture, and I hope that this practice spreads.