Another Oversight Council Meeting

On October 24^th, Jinja Honchō held the regular autumn meeting of its Oversight Council.

A couple of years ago, I commented that these meetings used to be boring events at which everything was rubber stamped without debate, but that things had changed! Now, they are boring because everyone argues about the presidency, and no progress is made…

OK, that is slightly unfair. As normal, all the resolutions necessary to keep Jinja Honchō going were passed, without any noticeable opposition. A regulation needed to be changed as a result of Tsurugaoka Hachimangū leaving Jinja Honchō, and that led to some discussion of why jinja might be leaving. The upshot of that, however, was that nobody really knew, and the reasons were probably different in each case. At the moment there is no sign of a systematic movement to leave Jinja Honchō, so that probably is all that they can say.

There was, however, a lot of argument about the presidency, and no progress was made. Everybody seems to have agreed that the chairman cannot appoint the president by himself: the courts were very clear about this. (So, I suppose that is progress.) The chairman made a statement in which he accepted that his appointment of Revd Ashihara was invalid, although he deeply regretted that fact.

The management side of Jinja Honchō asserted that the chairman now had to appoint Revd Tanaka, and made vague legal threats against everyone who had supported the other side. They even pointed out that false attempts to change the representative of a religious corporation could be a criminal offence. This is true, but I would be frankly astonished if those conditions applied to this case. It has been through the courts enough for people to have noticed if there was criminality involved. One member of the Tanaka faction on the Oversight Council said that Revd Ashihara’s move to register himself as president will be seen as one of the great evil acts in the history of Jinja Honchō. Personally, I suspect that history will not focus quite so much on that particular part of the process.

On the other side, a summary of the Ashihara faction’s lawyer’s opinion was published in the same issue of Jinja Shinpō (November 4^th). He seems to agree with me: on the face of it, the court judgement says that both a board resolution and the chairman’s nomination are needed to appoint a president, and that the regulations assume that the chairman will do as he is told. That is not the same as saying that the chairman must do as he is told. My knowledge of the law in general tells me that there could be a decision in some other case determining that this sort of situation does create a legally-enforceable obligation to do as you are told, but if there were, I would expect the Tanaka faction’s lawyer to have cited it — and there is no sign that he has. So, it looks very much as though there really is still a legal ambiguity on what happens now.

The chairman said that the president’s official role is to support and advise the chairman (this is true — this is what is written in the regulations), and that he would not appoint someone to that post whom he did not trust to do that — and, specifically, that he would not appoint Revd Tanaka. He asked all the councillors to consider the best way forward in this situation.

The chair of the session then said that this was going to be discussed at an emergency meeting of the Board of Directors, and so, if there were no objections, he would close the discussion and move on. Some people shouted out that there were objections, but the chair (not the chairman of Jinja Honchō — yes, this is a bit confusing) went on to say that, since there were no objections, he would close the discussion.

While I do get the impression that the meeting was already running late by this point, I think that was a politically terrible decision.

At the meeting of the Board of Directors before the Oversight Council meeting, there were a lot of opinions thrown in each direction, but one (unnamed) director said that they should try to find someone, neither Revd Ashihara nor Revd Tanaka, on whom both sides could agree, and appoint him as president. (It has to be a member of the board, and they are all male.) I think that is the only way that the problem can possibly be resolved before the next Oversight Council meeting, in May, for which a new Oversight Council will be elected to, in turn, elect a new Board of Directors, but I am not seeing a huge amount of evidence that any other directors are willing to follow that person’s lead.

I should say that I think that Revd Tanaka has been, in many ways, a very good president of Jinja Honchō. He has played an active role, visiting all the prefectural Jinjachō and attending many multi-religion meetings, and he appears to have actively supported a number of attempts to engage seriously with the problems the Shinto world is facing. On the other hand, I think it is now clear that things must have been starting to go wrong before the real-estate scandal (check the Court Case tag for details), and they have now spiralled completely out of control.

It is possible that, at the emergency board meeting, both sides will accept that they, personally, need to compromise. I really hope that they do find a way forward.