The 2nd March issue of Jinja Shinpō included the next (and, I think, final) installment of Revd Tagawa’s column, where she talked about giving birth.
Her jinja is Fukumo Hachimangū (福母八幡宮), which means “Fortunate Mother Hachimangū”, and so it is famous for prayers for becoming pregnant, and then giving birth safely. Revd Tagawa opens the column by saying that, when she was officiating at prayers for safe birth, she noticed the petitioners’ due dates getting further and further away from hers, and before she knew it, hers was only a month away.
She realised that, although she had offered a prayer for safe delivery at her husband’s jinja, at the other end of Japan, she had not yet done one at her own — where she could do it any time. So she quickly got her husband to come and perform the matsuri.
Note that she did not perform the matsuri herself, even though she is the chief priest of the jinja. This is a standard feature of Shinto matsuri for particular requests: the person making the request does not officiate, even when they normally would. It is always someone else serving as an intermediary with the kami. Thus, it is common for the chief priest of a jinja not to officiate at matsuri to pray for the success of special events (like rebuildings) at the jinja. He (or she) is making the request, and so another priest at the jinja officiates. I do not think this is universal — some jinja only have one priest, after all — but it is something I commonly see when such events are reported in Jinja Shinpō.
A lot of people around Revd Tagawa were saying, right up until the end, “You’re the chief priest of a kami of safe birth! You’ll be fine!”, but a week after her due date labour had still not started. She went into hospital then, and finally gave birth three days after that. During labour, she haemorrhaged, and was on the verge of needing to be transferred to a larger hospital, but the medical staff managed to avoid that. In the end, her husband was able to be present at the birth, and they could both hear their son’s first cries.
Afterwards, the doctor and midwife told her that she had had a difficult birth, which made her think about what “safe birth” actually meant. Until she did it herself, she had imagined a process that went smoothly, with little pain, and no health problems. But now she realised that a human being was being born. It wasn’t going to be that easy. “Safe birth”, she thought, meant mother and child being healthy. In a different age, she would probably have died from blood loss, so the fact that she was back officiating at the jinja a month after giving birth was clearly a blessing from the kami.
She described giving birth as “kegarë” in which the mother gambles her life to give life to someone else. “Kegarë” is often translated as “impurity”, and birth is a traditional source of kegarë in Shinto, but here Revd Tagawa glosses it with kanji meaning “exhaustion of spirit”, which is a popular story about the origin of the word. Thus, the idea seems to be that the mother pours all of her spirit into the process of giving birth.
The end of the column suggests that she gave birth quite recently, because she uses the present tense when describing herself as a newly-minted mother (“new rice mother” in Japanese). She says that being both a mother and a chief priest needs a lot of energy and enthusiasm, but that she will try to be a “fortunate mother” for her son.