As discussed in the last two posts, as well as this one, I attended the 30th Kanagawa Prefectural Meeting of Jinja-Related People last week. There was time for conversation, so in this post I want to reflect a bit on what it was like.
The first thing was that it was very male-dominated. There were women there, including one of the priests from my local jinja who was collecting her 25 year certificate, but they were a small minority. On my table they were three out of nine, and we may have had the highest representation. I am pretty sure I saw quite a few all-male tables, and several with only one woman. This is still representative of the Shinto community, but the fact that they hand out certificates for 55 years of service explains why it will take time for things to change. They are changing — there are more women around now than there were twenty years ago. (I was the racial diversity. That is absolutely normal.)
It was also noticeable that, during the meal, a lot of people got up and went to greet people sitting on other tables. The tables were assigned by region within the prefecture, so I was sitting at one of the Kawasaki tables, and one of my neighbours mentioned that there were a lot of people there whom he didn’t see very often, so he had to take the opportunity.
I did get to talk to him quite a lot, because he kept coming back to the table to eat, and it turned out that he was Professor Kaneko, who taught classical Japanese at Kokugakuin University, and wrote one of the textbooks I use when studying norito. We had an interesting conversation, mostly about foreigners he has known, but also a bit about problems like pets in jinja. The problem there is that it is really not clear what the policy should be — some jinja do Shichigosan for pets, while others do not allow them in the precincts. I also spoke to his daughter-in-law, who is also a priest — that sort of situation is extremely common.
It was notable that no-one spoke to me until an animated conversation got going between me and the priest I already knew, which seemed to give them permission. This is also normal. I don’t know whether people wonder whether I can speak Japanese (a bit of thought would suggest that I wouldn’t be in that environment if I didn’t), but it is unusual for people to start conversations with me, even if they are very interested once one does start.
At one point, when I was explaining what I did at Jinja Honchō, I mentioned that I was not a priest, which got the response, “Oh, I assumed you were”. That, I think, is quite telling. The fact that I am white is completely overridden by the fact that I am at that gathering and work for Jinja Honchō — the natural assumption is that I am a priest. (This is not the first time that this has happened.) The Shinto community is not very diverse in the ways that count in the USA, but very few people in it seem to have any objection to it becoming more diverse in that way. This may be because the community is massively diverse in other ways, as I have repeatedly emphasised on this blog.