Jinja Shinpō published the results of its survey of its correspondent priests in the 3rd March issue. This survey is nominally about hatsumōdë, but the priests take the opportunity to write about lots of issues. The paper has been doing this for a few years (2024, 2023, 2022), but I think they have been expanding it over time. It is an incredibly valuable window onto the views of a wide range of priests, and I think that may be why it has been expanded. There will be six posts about this survey, including this one — the article takes up about a third of the issue, spread over the first three pages.
Jinja Shinpō received replies from 372 priests, which is about normal. This survey asked a bit about the jinja they were writing from, which I think is new. Seventy six are urban, 79 suburban, 128 rural, and 86 in depopulated regions. (I think the priests just chose the appropriate option, so there is unlikely to be a strict definition.) The scale of the jinja was measured in terms of the number of visitors it gets over the first three days of a typical year. Forty three got 100,000 or more, 81 were between 10,000 and 100,000, 22 from 5,000 to 10,000, 26 from 3,000 to 5,000, 45 from 1,000 to 3,000, 42 from 500 to 1,000, 71 from 100 to 500, 23 from 50 to 100, and 15 under 50. (The numbers are counting responding priests, and it is possible that Jinja Shinpō has more than one correspondent at some larger jinja. However, I think the purpose of this system is to link the paper to as many jinja as possible, and thus I do not expect there to be much overlap.)
Two things are striking from those numbers. The first is the size of the range in jinja sizes — about four orders of magnitude. The second is just how high the numbers are at the top, and how many jinja get that many. The jinja that gets the most is Meiji Jingū in Tokyo, which gets about three million every year, and there are only a handful of other jinja that break the million mark, but there are clearly dozens in the hundreds of thousands category. Japan is, of course, an extremely non-religious society…
This year’s weather was good, with almost 85% reporting clear weather. When asked about changes in numbers from last year, 154 (just over 40%) reported no significant change. One hundred and five (just under 30%) reported a small increase, and 41 (11.1%) a clear increase. On the other hand, sixty saw a small drop, and ten a clear drop.
The most common reason given for numbers being unchanged or slightly lower was that it was a long holiday. This year, New Year’s Day was on Wednesday, which meant that it was very sensible to take nine days off work. It also meant that the 4th and 5th were weekend days, and so people could put off hatsumōdë by a couple of days and still do it before going back to work. That, however, took the visit outside the first three days of the year that were the target of the survey. One jinja commented that there might have been an increase overall, even though the first three days were unchanged.
Another reason given for unchanged numbers was that the jinja was a small village jinja, and the same people came every year. Quite a few places mentioned this, or something similar.
Increases, however, were generally attributed to the good weather. An important group of exceptions were jinja on the Noto Peninsula. They saw an increase because there was a major earthquake on January 1st last year, and so nobody came on the 2nd or 3rd.