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Becoming Chief Priest

I have been reporting on all of Revd Tagawa’s columns about her career as a priest, but she is not the only female priest writing in the Komorebi (“Sunlight Through Leaves”) column of Jinja Shinpō. The other is Revd Nonaka, and in the January 13th issue she wrote about when she became a chief priest.

It is… a bit different.

She starts by saying that, in the year we changed from Heisei to Reiwa (2019), she became the chief priest of the jinja where she was serving, because she couldn’t put it off any longer, even though she didn’t feel ready. Even though it is, apparently, not a very big jinja, the chief priest is still the chief priest. (Her expression here is a bit hard for me to follow. I think she wants to say that it’s just large enough that a single priest occasionally feels a bit worried about performing the matsuri alone.)

At the same time, she had to become the head of the religious corporation. This involved all sorts of procedures: getting approval from the “directors” (that sounds rather grand, but the corporation needs legal officers other than the chief priest — roles almost always held by the older ujiko), sending the necessary paperwork to Jinja Honchō and the prefecture (Kōchi Prefecture, in Shikoku) through the prefectural Jinjachō, changing the registration at the local Legal Affairs Office, and then going around all the ujiko and sōdai to let them know. This, she says, was something that she experienced as a middle-aged woman of sixty.

When she became chief priest of that jinja, her nephew, who became the senior priest (negi) of her jinja, became the chief priest of all the other jinja that the previous chief priest had been responsible for, which took a weight off her shoulders. She says that she is impressed by priests who handle lots of jinja at different scales with lots of different ujiko.

At first, the previous chief priest — her father — was still around to help out and guide her, so she was a “trainee chief priest” (although she isn’t sure she should say that). The content of the role was not that different from what she had been doing before: preparing for matsuri, performing them, and cleaning the sanctuaries and precincts. Her nephew helped out, and her younger sister helped out with parts other than the matsuri.

At that point, COVID-19 hit, and all the events shut down, although they continued performing the matsuri. During the pandemic, she had a hip replacement operation, and around the time she started walking again, her father died, and then her nephew’s children brought COVID home from school and it went around the family. The jinja had to be shut down for three weeks to avoid spreading infection. She says that, ironically, the more problems she had to deal with, the more settled as chief priest she felt.

From what I have seen and heard, this sort of account is fairly typical of rural jinja. (Kōchi is a very rural prefecture, with a total population of around 650,000, or a bit less than half the population of Kawasaki, the city where I live.) The jinja is run by a family, with all hands on deck, and chief priests do not retire until they are in their eighties, and think that they might die fairly soon. (And, therefore, sixty is still middle age.) The chief priest is (normally) responsible for multiple jinja, and it is not uncommon for the senior priest of the central jinja to serve as the chief priest of some of the surrounding ones.

However, I think there may be a bit of what is called the “modesty topos” in here, because Revd Nonaka is writing in her capacity as the Deputy Head of Kōchi Prefectural Jinjachō.

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1 thought on “Becoming Chief Priest”

  1. How interesting! I was in Kochi city last year, visiting a friend who lives there now. I did visit a couple jinja, though never made it outside of the city to any rural ones.

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