One topic that Sakurai handles several times in his book is the problem of successors for priests. This is something that comes up a lot, but Sakurai is more willing than most to write clearly about the elements that make this problem particularly difficult to solve.
One of the manifestations of the shortage of priests is the number of priests who are responsible for forty or fifty jinja. However, while this is quite a lot of pressure on the chief priests, they do not necessarily want to give any of those jinja up. This is because, if the annual income from each jinja is about ¥100,000, they need forty or fifty to have a reasonable annual income. Even if the income from one jinja is a lot lower, a group of a dozen can still make an important contribution. A typical monthly income from one jinja of ¥30,000 is mentioned at one point, in which case you would need about a dozen to have a middle-class income for a single person.
This connects to another problem. The training costs to become a priest are substantial, but you are not, realistically, going to earn as much as you spent unless you take over 50 jinja
Sakurai talks quite a bit about “latent priests”. These are people who are licensed priests, but not serving at a jinja. He thinks there are a lot of them, particularly people who have trained after another career. Such people have important advantages. They have pensions, so they do not need to live on the income from their jinja, and they are likely to be flexible about where they live. If they are in their late sixties, they are still fairly young as chief priests go, and so they should be ideal candidates.
However, that runs into another problem. The adherents of a jinja often do not want a new chief priest whom they do not know and who is “not from around here”. Sakurai’s impatience with this is palpable. He does suggest that chief priests could take someone on as a junior priest first, so that the local people could get to know them, and be brought around to accepting them as the new chief priest. That, however, is only going to work if the junior priest has an independent income, because the jinja where this is an issue are not going provide enough income to support two priests.
Sakurai suggests that Jinja Honchō should run a “matching service”, so that priests without jinja can find jinja without priests. It’s not a bad idea in itself, but there do seem to be more fundamental problems that need to be solved first.
His discussion does suggest a possible approach. Jinja Honchō could actively recruit people in their early sixties, with a view to having them complete their priestly training immediately after retirement and take up part-time posts as junior priests, on minimum wage when they perform or serve at matsuri (legally, they have to be paid that much), soon after that. They would serve in that position for a few years before taking over a group of jinja as chief priest. This could work because they do not need to earn a living wage (they have pensions), and they have time to voluntarily go around the area and get to know the ujiko. I do not think this would require any changes to the regulations, but it would require a major change in attitudes, away from the focus on training the children of priestly families.
Given that the current system is not working, however, something has got to change.