hatsumōdë

This year, Jinja Shinpō carried out a survey of its local correspondents to ask about the state of hatsumōdë, and reported the results in the 14 February issue. They did this last year as well, to find out how the pandemic was affecting smaller jinja. The particular questions this year were about whether numbers of visitors had increased, decreased, or stayed the same since last year, and since the year before last (which was before the pandemic had made it to Japan). In addition, there was a space for the… Read More »Hatsumōdë Survey 2022

In the January 24th issue, Jinja Shinpō published an article about hatsumōdë this year, the second year under the influence of COVID-19. The big picture is that, at most jinja, numbers were way up on last year, but still not back to 2020 levels, before the pandemic got started. In general, the number of visitors to a jinja was around 70% of 2020 levels. At this point, the reports are all from major jinja, such as Jingū in Isë, Meiji Jingū in Tokyo, Fushimi Inari Taisha in Kyoto, and Dazaifu… Read More »Hatsumōdë 2022

In my last post, I reported on Jinja Shinpō’s hatsumōdë survey of about 400 priests across the country. They also conducted an online survey of about a thousand “ordinary” Japanese, to see how they had handled hatsumōdë this year. The first result they reported is that 78.2% of them had come across the encouragement to spread out hatsumōdë visits. That advertising campaign really does seem to have been effective, which underwrites the complaints made by rural priests, reported in my last post, that it was too much “one size fits… Read More »Hatsumōdë: The Visitors’ View

This year’s hatsumōdë was, thanks to COVID-19, very different from most years. I have already written about some of the early reports, but Jinja Shinpō has now completed a survey of its local contacts, which means that it has responses from over 400 priests from across Japan, covering a wide range of types of jinja. The results show that, unsurprisingly, the impact of the pandemic varied a lot from jinja to jinja. The simplest statistic is that about 80% of jinja reported at least some fall in hatsumōdë visitors over… Read More »Hatsumōdë: The Big Picture

Last week’s Jinja Shinpō contained the first official report on this year’s hatsumōdë, with a suggestion that there would be further articles once the reporters had heard from some smaller jinja around Japan, and had time to build up something of an overview of the country. This year is likely to have been bad, however, and not just because of the pandemic. Some regions had unusually heavy snow, which made it physically difficult to get to some jinja. The overall picture was that jinja saw massive reductions in visitor numbers… Read More »Hatsumōdë Reports

In normal years, hatsumōdë mainly happens in the first three days of the year, and they are over, so we are starting to hear how that period was different this year. And it was different. To start with the least surprising one, reports say that Meiji Jingū in Tokyo has had about 20% of its normal visitors. It normally has about three million, so that’s still a lot, but the jinja is also pretty big. I hear from someone who was there that the precincts felt empty on the first.… Read More »Hatsumōdë Under COVID