As I said in my last post, the Supreme Court has now ruled on the question of who is the president of Jinja Honchō, and has ruled that it is not Revd Ashihara. Jinja Honchō and their lawyer have issued statements in response to this, as reported in the October 28th issue of Jinja Shinpō.
They do not appear to be seeking compromise and reconciliation.
Let us start with the legal side. Jinja Honchō’s lawyer claims that the court decision makes it clear that the president is effectively appointed by the board of directors, and that the chairman has neither the authority to appoint a president, nor to veto a president. He says that the claim by the other side that the chairman does not have to follow the board’s direction is wrong, and a bad faith argument, pushing the chairman to do something illegal.
Normally, of course, one takes a lawyer’s word for the legal interpretation of a court judgement, but in this case both sides have lawyers, and they do not agree. So I downloaded the original judgement to have a look. The ruling is clear that the chairman can’t appoint a president without a board decision, and that Jinja Honchō’s regulations assume that the chairman will do as he is told, but it does not address the question of what happens if he doesn’t. (Other than years of chaos and court cases, as we have seen.) It may be that this creates legal grounds to have a court rule that the chairman can be deemed to have appointed Revd Tanaka, but that would not be the same as the chairman acting illegally by not appointing him. (The regulations explicitly state that all responsibility for the chairman’s actions is borne by the board of directors, which appears to mean that Jinja Honchō would have to sue its own board, not the chairman, to get the action changed.)
Jinja Honchō’s statement affirms that Revd Ashihara is not president (definitely true) and that he cannot avoid legal and moral responsibility for all the problems that have arisen. That second point is much more tendentious. His interpretation of the regulations was wrong, but it was not stupid. The court judgement spends several pages looking at the whole of the regulations to conclude that the wording of the relevant regulation means that the board must vote. Legally, he was wrong, and he is not president, but there would have to be another court case to determine whether he is required to compensate Jinja Honchō for his mistake. (I do not know whether Jinja Honchō was awarded costs in the court case.)
In any case, I find both responses disappointing. As I said in the last post, the court case does not solve the real problem, which is the divisions in the Shinto world. I was hoping to see offerings of olive branches, and the creation of space for face-saving climb-downs at this point, but it seems that was not to be. Jinja Shinpō has not reported the other side’s statements in as much detail, but I do not get the impression that they have been much more conciliatory. (Granted, they lost the court case, so they are not in a position to offer face-saving ways forward.)
The Oversight Council met last week, but the reports have not yet been published. I strongly suspect that this issue will have come up again, so I expect to write about this next week as well.