The August 5th issue of Jinja Shinpō contained an article reporting on a meeting of the Jinja Honchō Board of Directors that was held on July 19th. Much of the business was important but uninteresting — for example, one bit of the Jinja Honchō regulations needed to be modified to delete Tsurugaoka Hachimangū from the list of Beppyō Jinja (particularly important jinja that are supervised directly by Jinja Honchō rather than by the Prefectural Jinjachō) because Tsurugaoka Hachimangū has left Jinja Honchō entirely. Two topics, however, were more controversial, and I think I should write about them.
As a general note, the article reports on what was said at the meeting, but does not say who said what. This is unlike the Oversight Council reports, where most statements are attributed.
I will deal with the topics in the opposite order to that in which they were handled at the meeting. The meeting closed with what seems to have been a somewhat ill-tempered discussion of the Chairman’s opening remarks at the Oversight Council meeting in May. As I explained in my account of that meeting, he went off script. At the board meeting, someone asked whether the unanimously elected Chairman could not even state his own opinion at the Oversight Council. The secretariat basically said no, he had to say what he was told to, because the regulations said that all his actions should be carried out with the guidance of the board and the President, and that they bore responsibility for those actions. If he wanted to offer his own opinion, he needed to get approval from the board, and tell them in advance.
In the course of this, the secretariat mentioned that the script was approved by the board, to which one director responded that he had never approved a single script in all his years as a director. The response was that “approved by the board” didn’t mean all the directors, just the handful at the top.
Somebody then pointed out that other bits of the regulations said that the Chairman was in overall charge of Jinja Honchō, and that the President manages the organisation at the instruction of the Chairman. Surely, the argument went, that meant that the Chairman could make statements by himself, and the suggestion that the script had been switched was very impolite. The Chairman (in statements that are attributed) said that he didn’t think he needed to mechanically read the script, and that it was natural to improvise somewhat, as long as he didn’t completely change the content or say anything that would create a crisis — and that he also thought that the suggestion that the script had been switched was impolite. The secretariat pointed out that the suggestion had been made by one of the councillors, not by the secretariat. Even so, the Chairman was not happy with them, and accused them of not engaging in dialogue in his closing remarks (which were also attributed).
This is obviously not good, but at least they are still all speaking to each other, and doing all the important but uninteresting business. It is abundantly clear that this crisis will not be truly resolved until Jinja Honchō revises its regulations to clarify the roles of the President and Chairman, or to abolish one or both of those positions, but we are still a long way from that being possible. I think we are about due a Supreme Court decision on the Presidency, and as I recall we should get that before the next Oversight Council meeting in October. In the meantime, Jinja Honchō will get on with its work, and individual jinja will generally continue as always.
This has got a bit long, so I will cover the second topic in a second post.