The September 16th issue of Jinja Shinpō carried a front page article about the meeting of the Jinja Honchō Board of Directors on September 6th at which they prepared for the October meeting of the Oversight Council. One remarkable thing is that, if the report is complete, they did not discuss the disputed presidency at all. It may be that they have all accepted that they are not going to make any progress on that problem in the board meetings, and decided to just ignore it for now. (I think the Supreme Court decision is about due, and it does make sense to wait for that.)
All the boring and necessary work was done, so there is a budget to present to the Oversight Council for approval, and only one topic seems to have been controversial: the question of retirement age.
As I discussed in an earlier post, the question of whether a retirement age should be introduced at Jinja Honchō is complicated by the background situation of the Shinto community in general. No conclusion was reached at the last meeting, but some of the directors did ask to hear from employees in person.
That was where the topic started this time. The lawyer dealing with labour relations explained why they were not going to do it: they had already gathered opinions from representatives of the majority of employees, and it would be hard to maintain anonymity and fairness if particular employees were talking to the board.
There were then a number of opinions offered, which are printed as quotations, but are not attributed. It was suggested that they have a general meeting of all employees, and try to find unanimous agreement on a way forward. Someone else said that they didn’t feel that the promotion of younger staff was being held up, so they could spend a few years looking into the issue. In what looks like a response to that, a director said that the situation was different from the chief priest of a jinja, and that department heads should serve for a fixed term before making way for younger staff, and the problem should be resolved soon. Another attendee suggested that it would be better to resolve this when the presidency has been sorted out, as the current president is technically only serving until the new president is appointed. (As noted above, that comment does not seem to have provoked a debate on the issue in general.)
It was suggested that people should produce proposals for ways in which retired department heads could continue to support their successors in time for the introduction of the retirement age next July. Someone responded by saying that it should not be introduced suddenly, and not applied to the current department heads at all, but rather introduced in stages for their successors. That provoked someone to say that almost all the young staff were in favour, and it should be introduced quickly — like next July.
In conclusion, President Tanaka said that he would listen to the opinions of lawyers and labour relations lawyers (this is a specific qualification in Japan), and take the opinions of the board into account while moving forward to introduce the retirement age by next July.
Unfortunately, it appears that this is a divisive issue, at least on the board. Jinja Honchō really doesn’t need any more of those right now, and I confess to some sympathy with the position that the problem over the presidency should be resolved first. On the other hand, deciding to wait before doing anything is picking a side. At least this problem does not look likely to lead to lawsuits.
As an aside, one of the departmental reports mentioned that five new researchers have been appointed to the research section (relatively junior existing employees of Jinja Honchō), and that these are the first new appointments for fourteen years. I think this may have been prompted by all the issues coming up around the digital transformation.