I recently read a book entitled Jinja Kanri Un’ei Nōto (Notes on Management Theory for Jinja, 神社管理運営論ノート), by Sakurai Yoshio (櫻井良生). Revd Sakurai is a priest, but his main career seems to have been in the law — his doctorate, which he got after retirement, was about arbitration processes. He teaches “Law for Priests” to trainee priests at Kōgakkan University, and a lot of the book is basically “how not to get sued”. That includes advice like “yes, you have to priests overtime”, for example. The Shinto community does not like to talk about people working at jinja, but the law doesn’t care — as far as it is concerned, they are employees.
I want to write about a couple of things from this book, and the second is actually about the content. The first, though, is something broader that it reminded me of.
In a number of places, Sakurai talks about a “certain newspaper” (I am pretty sure he means Asahi Shinbun) being anti-Japanese, or about the risks of “foreigners” buying land around jinja. Anyone who doesn’t like what jinja do seems to be anti-Japanese, even a traitor. In a couple of places he raises the case from a few years ago when animal rights groups campaigned to get a traditional Shinto ceremony changed because a horse broke its leg during it. He suggests they are actually anti-Japanese, and wonders why they don’t go after horse racing or factory farming. (I strongly suspect that they do, in fact, go after both those groups, but that he simply is not aware of it.) Even when talking about the problems of not following legal requirement on employment, he suggests that anyone who sues a jinja must be anti-Japanese.
On the other hand, when talking about his students, he laments the difficulty that older students, particularly the female ones, have finding places and talks about the effort he puts in to finding a jinja willing to at least put them on the books. (This is partly because they need two years’ service to get the level of licence they passed the exams for.) This ended up with him becoming the chief priest of a jinja with no income, and putting one of the students on the books as junior priest so that she could start building up her service record.
I strongly disagree with the attitudes described first, but think that his actions to help priests find jinja are admirable, and something I would support. Although he might not want my support — I might be too foreign.
This is something that comes up a lot for me working in the Shinto world. I am, broadly speaking, a left-wing liberal. I would be perfectly happy to see a female Tennō in my lifetime, but I work with people who think that would lead to the collapse of Japan. (No, it wouldn’t.) I definitely do not agree with the standard position on the Japanese military that gets reported in Jinja Shinpō. But, if I want to do anything in the Shinto world, I have to work with these people. And so I do. And together we are making Shinto much more accessible to foreigners.
I think this is a principle that is generally important. If you want to make a difference in the world, you should work towards a goal with anyone who agrees with that goal, even if they disagree strongly with other goals that you have. Not only does the broader coalition make you more likely to achieve your goals, the web of overlapping alliances that this approach creates makes it harder for society to become polarised. The relationships you build may lead to understanding of each other’s positions, and even to someone changing their mind! (That might be you, and that’s fine — you might be the one who is wrong.) Because of this, I do not think that it is merely permissible to work with such people — I think working with them is morally better than not doing so, and in many circumstances it may actually be wrong to refuse to work with them.
The second point I want to cover will have to wait for the next post.