The Komorebi column in the September 14th issue of Jinja Shinpō was by a priest who is also a lawyer (kind of — he can charge for legal advice, but the Japanese system doesn’t perfectly map onto UK or US ones). He was writing about the problem of jinja that are both religious corporations, and hard to maintain, and he wanted to make three points.
The first is that merging two jinja legally does not necessarily mean merging them religiously. One jinja might simply be moved to the precincts of the other, where it becomes a subsidiary jinja, but still a separate jinja. It might even be left on its original site, which would become a detached part of the precincts of the jinja it had been legally merged into.
The second was that the work is not over when you dissolve a legal corporation. You have to finish winding it up, which means clearing all its liabilities and transferring all its assets. That takes time, and is expensive — and if you are closing the jinja down, it doesn’t have many assets to start with.
The third was that there is no easy answer to whether it is easier and cheaper to merge or close down. To merge, you need to find another religious corporation that is willing to take on the liabilities of the one you want to merge. If the legal or financial situation is complex, that might be tricky, and take time. While dissolution only needs the decision of one jinja, you are still left with winding things up. Which of those is easier will depend very much on the situation of the jinja.
He comments that sometimes the problems get on top of the people involved, and the process is abandoned part way through. The religious corporation continues to file the necessary documents, at least for now, but it is not really active. That, of course, is a problem waiting to happen.
He says that he personally thinks that the best solution in those sorts of cases is to merge the legal corporation with another jinja, but leave the religious situation as it is. That does have a lot of advantages. It avoids the opposition that closing one of the jinja would arouse, and it makes the legal situation easier because there is one less corporation. The practical problems of maintaining the jinja are, at least, not made any worse, and if the jinja is legally merged with its chief priest’s main jinja, they are actually slightly better, because that chief priest has less paperwork to do. Of course, he, or she, still has to physically look after both jinja and make sure that the matsuri get performed.
This ties into the idea I mentioned last week, of religiously merging jinja but then moving a separated spirit of the kami into a stone pillar and erecting it on the original site. That is a more radical way to solve the problem, because it removes the need to maintain buildings, but it is along the same lines. To be honest, I think there is going to have to be a serious reduction in the number of legal corporations covering the jinja of Japan, because there are not enough people to effectively do what is legally necessary to sustain all the ones that exist.
There might, however, be ways to do that without reducing the number of jinja where the kami are venerated.