Merging Jinja

I found one of the articles in Issue 280/281 of the Journal of Shintō Studies particularly interesting. It is “The Significance and Challenges of Research on the Modern and Contemporary History of Individual Shrines: The Case of Atsuta Shrine in Haruno-chō, Hamamatsu City”, by Kawamura Tadanobu (河村忠伸). One of the reasons it is so interesting is that Kawamura is the chief priest of the jinja in question. He addresses that in the paper, and acknowledges that it means he is not entirely neutral. On the other hand, he has access to all the records of the jinja, and only the chief priest can ethically have such access — it is his job to decide what can and cannot be made public. The article has interesting things to say about disagreements between local traditions and written records, about the origin and age of local matsuri, and about the process of merging jinja in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this post, I want to pick up on some of the things Kawamura says about the process of merging jinja.

At almost all jinja, the kami is housed in an object called the goshintai (御神体) or mitamashiro (御霊代) — Kawamura uses the latter term. This item is, in general, not the kami, as is shown by the fact that the kami can be moved out of one mitamashiro and into another. At some jinja, this is a regular occurrence, while at others it is all but unthinkable. When a kami has been moved out of a mitamashiro, the item is “empty”, and no longer a mitamashiro. There are examples of images of kami that used to be mitamashiro and are now on display in museums — these are (or at least should be) all cases in which the kami has been moved out, and the mitamashiro is empty. An occupied mitamashiro should never be displayed. (Obligatory disclaimer: there are always exceptions in Shinto.) While, in theory, an empty mitamashiro is just an object, and could be simply thrown away, they are almost invariably treated with more respect than that, and either kept (possibly in a museum) or disposed of with ceremony.

There are, thus, two fundamentally different ways in which a kami can be merged into a different jinja. One is simply moving the mitamashiro from one building to another. The other is moving the kami out of the original mitamashiro and into a mitamashiro at the new jinja. From the perspective of venerators, there is no practical difference, as the mitamashiro cannot be seen. However, there is an important difference in future possibilities. If the mitamashiro, complete with kami, is simply moved into a new sanctuary, it can be moved out again. The jinja can be completely demerged — the kami that was merged for a time is no longer present at the jinja into which it was merged. On the other hand, if the kami was transferred into the jinja’s mitamashiro, that is not possible, because it is not possible to selectively remove kami from a mitamashiro — it is all or nothing.

According to Kawamura, the mergers at Atsuta Jinja, which involved about a dozen other jinja, were basically of the second type, with the kami moved to a new mitamashiro, but with a twist. There were two mitamashiro at Atsuta Jinja before the late nineteenth century mergers, because there had been a merger of the first type much earlier. In the nineteenth century, the priests created a new mitamashiro, and moved the kami from all the merged jinja into this object, recording all the kami and jinja on the base. (I do not know what the object is — Kawamura does not say.) However, the original mitamashiro, now empty, were kept in the inner chamber of the main sanctuary of Atsuta Jinja. This is one of the things that only the chief priest of the jinja is in a position to know.

Some of the merged jinja were demerged afterwards. (That is an interesting phenomenon in itself, but not my focus here.) According to Kawamura, this was done by creating a separated spirit of the appropriate kami from the joint mitamashiro and moving it to the original mitamashiro from that jinja, which was then returned to the original site.

However, although the original mitamashiro, inhabited by the original kami, was now back on the original site, this is a separated spirit, and the main spirit of the kami is still enshrined at Atsuta Jinja. A separated spirit is a fully independent manifestation of the kami, unlike the presence of the kami in an ofuda, but it is, in some sense that is not dreadfully clear, dependent on the original spirit.

Kawamura suggests this process as one way to deal with rural depopulation making jinja unsupportable. (I think he has personal experience of this issue.) He says that the kami of a jinja could be transferred to another jinja, where it can be actively venerated. However, a separated spirit of the kami could be transferred to a stone pillar, which could then be set up on the original site. The kami would then still be present on the original site, and could still be venerated there, but would not need maintenance, because stone pillars are really durable (vide Stonehenge). However, the main spirit of the kami would be at the jinja where it was receiving regular reverence, and so it would not be being neglected. (Yes, the stone pillar would be a visible mitamashiro. I did say there were exceptions to everything.) I think this idea has a lot of potential to reconcile some fundamental principles of Shinto with the practical problems arising in depopulated areas.

This discussion is almost an aside in the paper, but it is the clearest discussion of the theology of this process that I have seen anywhere. I do not know how generally accepted it is, but it is consistent with all the other references to the topic I have seen, and Kawamura does not appear to think it will be controversial. At the very least, I think it is one of the mainstream views within Jinja Shinto.