Records of Matsuri

The 27^th January issue of Jinja Shinpō included a long article by a Revd Saitō, a priest in Akita Prefecture who played an important role in a large project to record unique matsuri in the prefecture.

The immediate trigger for this project was the Great East Japan Earthquake. It inspired Revd Saitō to think again about the importance of preserving jinja and their traditions for the future, and within that he felt that the preservation and restoration of matsuri and other rites was a particularly difficult problem.

This was not just an issue of natural disasters. If anything interrupts the transmission of a rite, there is a potential problem. This could be something as simple as a change of chief priest. If the new chief priest did not have the opportunity to learn from someone who had participated in the matsuri, then that would almost inevitably stop, and be very difficult to revive. It is not uncommon for rural jinja today to not have a priest ready to take over when the old one dies, and so a delay, and an outsider taking on the role, is something that happens often enough that people need to take it into account.

Obviously, one solution here is to have records of the matsuri. Revd Saitō believed, plausibly, that visual records, particularly videos, would be more helpful than text, and so the prefectural Jinjachō started a project to create such records of the significant local rites in the area. They set up a committee and divided the prefecture into three parts, and then started looking at the scope of the problem.

Overall, there are said to be over 800 such rites that have a history in Akita Prefecture, but if you focus it down to exclude ones that essentially follow standard Jinja Shinto forms now, there are a lot fewer. Many of the unique ones have not been preserved to the present day, most likely because of the familiar factors of social change and rural depopulation. After applying fairly strict standards, they had 31 in the central area, 14 in the north, and 30 in the south.

Originally, they expected it to take three years to gather the information, and this was to be followed by a period of editing the footage, organising everything, deciding how it was going to be archived, and publishing a final report in some form.

Gathering the data did not go smoothly, however. The first problem was structural: a lot of the matsuri were on the same day, and the recording team couldn’t be in two places at once. Some of the events were postponed for local reasons. And there were problems with the equipment. In the end, they had to allow another two years to film all of the events. At that point, in 2018, they had records of 70 matsuri sitting on high-capacity hard drives at the Jinjachō. And there they remain.

Revd Saitō went on to emphasise the importance of preserving these records if there were to be a realistic chance of reviving a matsuri that had stopped for any period of time, and that there was a real risk of that happening in a large number of cases. He also discussed the meaning of matsuri, and what would be necessary to preserve them. He raised the connection to rice agriculture, which I think is one of the issues. When almost no-one, even among the few people left in rural areas, is actively involved in rice agriculture, it is harder to generate commitment to matsuri devoted to it. I don’t think the matsuri should be abandoned and replaced, but I do think that people need to give serious thought to where these matsuri can find a role in contemporary society as it is. Some places have, but this is even harder than recording the matsuri.

The editorial in the 3^rd February issue of Jinja Shinpō picked up on this article, and urged younger priests to get involved in making such records, because they would have the necessary skills to record and edit the videos. I think that may be a little optimistic, but it is undeniable that younger priests do need to be actively involved in recording and preserving matsuri if they are going to survive.