The Gokoku Jinja (護國神社) are, as I have mentioned before, local jinja enshrining the war dead. Basically, there is one per prefecture, but there are some prefectures without one (including Kanagawa, where I live, and Tokyo), and others with two or more, so there are 52 in total. These jinja are all members of an association, and the August 4th issue of Jinja Shinpō included a long round-table interview with the chairman and two vice-chairmen of the association: Revd Izumi, chief priest of Hyōgo-ken Himeji Gokoku Jinja (兵庫縣姫路護國神社), Revd Takenaka, chief priest of Chiba-ken Gokoku Jinja (千葉縣護國神社), and Revd Omoteyama, chief priest of Akita-ken Gokoku Jinja (秋田県護国神社). If you are looking at the kanji carefully, you will see that the one in Akita uses different kanji for “ken” and “koku” — it uses the modern ones, while the other two use the older, pre-war versions.
The interview and discussion covered a wide range of topics, but I want to focus on what they said about the future of these jinja. As I have mentioned before, they face a serious crisis. They were founded to pay tribute to and ease the souls of the war dead. This seems to include anyone in a military or quasi-military role on the side of the Tennō since about 1868, but the overwhelming majority of the people enshrined in all the jinja were killed in the War of Greater East Asia, which got swept up into World War II once the latter war started. In theory, they would also enshrine people from their area killed in military service to the nation since then, but there aren’t any. This means that there are very few people left who knew anyone enshrined there personally, and such people were the main supporters of the jinja.
Indeed, it seems that, in the past, there was opposition from bereaved families and the comrades-in-arms of the war dead to the jinja doing anything apart from matsuri for the war dead themselves — the sorts of individual matsuri carried out at other jinja were thought to be inappropriate. However, Revd Omoteyama said that when he started serving at his jinja about forty years ago, he told the previous chief priest (his father) that he thought the jinja should reduce its economic reliance on the bereaved families. The widows were already living on pensions, and so did not have much money in the first place. However, if they just stopped accepting donations from them, the jinja would go bankrupt, so they had to do something else — and that included accepting general requests for prayers. As a result, it seems that Akita-ken Gokoku Jinja is much less reliant on donations from the bereaved than most Gokoku Jinja, and Revd Omoteyama believes that other jinja can make the same sort of change. However, he emphasised that this did not mean any change in their attitude to the bereaved, or to the importance of the families of the war dead.
The association is planning an online meeting for all 52 jinja to discuss how to move forward. Revd Izumi (who is the current chairman of the association) said that he recognised the need for all the jinja to move forward together, with a shared theology. They have already had some joint projects, such as a poster for this year (this newspaper article, in Sankei Shimbum, has a picture of it at the top — at least at the time of writing), and a goshuinchō (御朱印帳) in which you can collect the goshuin from all of the jinja. They were, apparently, surprised that people wanted to do that. However, as Revd Izumi said, the jinja have two issues: how to maintain their links with the bereaved families, and how to develop links with new adherents.
These jinja are literally praying that their original purpose will become a matter of purely historical interest, so I hope that they do manage to find a way forward.