Cashless Payments Revisited

The 17^th February issue of Jinja Shinpō included an article reporting on the latest meeting of Jinja Honchō’s committee to consider contemporary issues, which basically means the questions of how jinja should deal with the online world, and what they should do about cashless payments.

As I have mentioned before, since the pandemic Japan has become less and less of a cash-based society, and foreign tourists often do not have Japanese cash at all. This raises an issue for jinja, because they are not set up to take cashless payments, and there were administrative and legal obstacles to getting set up. One of the things reported at the meeting was the content of the discussions that Jinja Honchō has been holding over the last two years with the companies that administer cashless payments.

It seems that the government has decided to revise the regulations so that prepaid cashless services can be used to make donations and that, I think in response to that, PayPay, which is the biggest such service in Japan, has started accepting jinja and temples as clients. Jinja Honchō talked to Tōyō Keizai, an economics magazine, and they published an online article about the upcoming changes in visits to jinja. In March, Jinja Honchō’s internal newsletter will have an article about the problems with cashless donations. From context, I am guessing that this will focus on the practical problems, rather than the theological ones.

The theological issues will be dealt with in this committee’s report, which will be finalised at the next meeting. A draft was circulated and discussed at this meeting, and the committee agreed on the need to be very careful about phrasing to avoid being misunderstood. This was noted as being particularly important for the sections on crowdfunding and cashless offerings, because some jinja are already doing them. There is also the issue that the situation is still changing rapidly (a couple of years ago it was not obvious that PayPay would become the main cashless service, for example), and so the recommendations need to be the sort of thing that can still be applied in a new situation.

The need to be careful because some jinja already have crowdfundings and cashless offerings is a particular example of a common policy at Jinja Honchō. As far as possible, they try to avoid suggesting that any particular jinja is “doing it wrong”. There are exceptions (do not charge people to view the goshintai, for example), but over a very wide range of practices Jinja Honchō’s policy is to respect the way that individual jinja do things. They do establish a standard, and provide support in keeping to it, but in almost all cases they do not object to deliberate decisions to do things differently. Quite a few priests seem to be under the impression that Jinja Honchō has an Inquisition, and will come and discipline them if they are found to be doing things in a different way, but that is a misapprehension.

I hope I will be able to get hold of this report, and write about it, because the ability to make donations by credit card, or similar, is obviously of great interest to people practising Shinto outside Japan.