The August 3rd issue of Jinja Shinpō also included the first article by another Komorebi author. Revd Yokota is a sacred dance instructor for Hiroshima Prefectural Jinjachō, and a junior priest at Yoshiura Hachiman Jinja (吉浦八幡神社). Her articles in this series will focus on her half-century and more of experience of sacred dance, and so the first one, naturally enough, is about how she got started.
She was born into a priestly family (second daughter, third child). She was part of the family’s preparation for matsuri from a very early age, and felt that the kami were an awesome, almost frightening, presence from the beginning. She started practising and offering sacred dance from the age of seven, along with her sisters and friends. She says that she could feel the reaction of the kami, and that this was when she started to feel that matsuri linked hearts.
When she was at high school, her family jinja had its 1100th anniversary, and the ujiko wanted a full performance of Urayasu-no-Mai. She went to study it at the jinja her older sister had married into, and then went to a training session at Meiji Jingū in Tokyo with her younger sister. She thought one session would be enough, but she couldn’t have been more wrong. The instructor told her that she still did not understand the heart of sacred dance, and told her to come back the following year for more training. In retrospect she sees this as the kami encouraging her to deepen her engagement with Shinto through dance.
She later met her husband, and moved to his jinja, her current one. This is in a small rural town with mountains on three sides and the sea on the other (although now it is legally part of Kurë City), and it has preserved a lot of its old traditions. People who have gone elsewhere for work often return to attend the matsuri, something that is not that unusual in contemporary Japan.
The jinja has a tradition that local elementary and junior high school girls offer Urayasu-no-Mai at the main annual matsuri. According to her husband’s grandmother, this tradition started when Urayasu-no-Mai was created, in 1940, and has been continued without a break, so that there were dancers who were the third generation in their family to do it. When the grandmother found out that Revd Yokota had a formal qualification in sacred dance (thanks to those training sessions in Tokyo), she handed her the responsibility for all the jinja’s dances. This, she says, is when she really had to start learning Urayasu-no-Mai, as the person responsible for continuing Yoshiura Hachiman Jinja’s tradition.
This could be another interesting series, and if it is I will write about future parts as well.
One note. She is a junior priest (gon-negi 権禰宜) despite being slightly older than I am because there are only two priests at most jinja who are not junior priests: the chief priest, and the designated heir. The chief priest is almost certainly her husband, and the heir her son (or possibly daughter, or son-in-law — in theory daughter-in-law is also a possibility, but I have not actually come across that pattern). It is also possible that the chief priest is her father-in-law, and the heir her husband, although given her age that is significantly less likely, even in Shinto. Thus, it is quite normal to have a junior priest in charge of important traditions.
Please continue this series of articles about Rev. Yokota and sacred dance. I look forward to learning.
If she continues in this vein, I will. Glad you found this interesting!