Community
who belongs, how you join, how it is organized
Ujiko — the households of the parish.
You belong to a shrine by living inside its area. There is no membership, no profession of faith and no way to convert in or out; the relationship is with the ground. Households owe labour and money, and the parish council usually has more say over the shrine than the priest does.
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The parish, not the member.
A neighborhood belongs to its shrine; the shrine belongs to its neighborhood. Nobody signs anything.
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The Association of Shrines.
Jinja Honcho was founded in 1946 to hold the shrines together after the occupation dissolved State Shinto, and around eighty thousand affiliate. Its political arm lobbies for constitutional revision and imperial ritual, which is why several major shrines have left it — Nikko Toshogu in 2019, others before — and Fushimi Inari and Yasukuni never joined.
⚖ contested within
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Who pays.
Coins in the box, envelopes for private prayers, parish dues, charms and fortunes, and for urban shrines the extremely profitable renting out of land as car parks. There are roughly twenty thousand priests for eighty thousand shrines, so most priests hold several and many hold other jobs as well.
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The priests, and the miko.
Training is at Kokugakuin in Tokyo or Kogakkan in Ise, and a great many priests inherit the shrine from a father anyway. Women were admitted to the priesthood after 1945 and are now about a tenth of it. The miko in red and white are usually students on short contracts — a job, not an office, though the role descends from something older and stranger.
held by most
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The shrines with nobody left.
A shrine survives on the households that sweep it, and rural Japan is emptying. A large share of shrines already have no resident priest, and projections of continued depopulation put many thousands at risk of closure. When the last family in a hamlet leaves, the kami stays where it is and nobody comes.
⚖ contested within
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State Shinto, and Yasukuni.
From 1868 the government reclassified shrine attendance as civic duty rather than religion, so it could be required of Christians and Buddhists; merged and destroyed tens of thousands of village shrines; and taught the descent from Amaterasu as history. The occupation dissolved the system in 1945. Yasukuni, which enshrined fourteen Class A war criminals in 1978, is why the Emperor has not visited it since, and why every ministerial visit is an international incident.
⚖ contested within
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