A Religious Body with a Political Arm

Jinja Honcho's work goes beyond administering shrines and certifying priests. Since 1969 it has maintained an affiliated political advocacy organisation, Shinto Seiji Renmei, the Shinto Association of Spiritual Leadership, through which it lobbies on issues it treats as bound up with Shinto's place in Japanese public life: revision of the postwar constitution, official reverence at Yasukuni Shrine by government figures, maintenance of the male only imperial succession, and public education it regards as insufficiently respectful of Japanese tradition and the imperial institution. Many members of Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party have belonged to Shinto Seiji Renmei's affiliated parliamentary group, giving Jinja Honcho a channel of influence in national politics unusual for a religious body that otherwise has no government authority of its own and depends on member shrine dues and its own commercial activity, including talisman and calendar sales, for funding.

This political dimension sits alongside Jinja Honcho's more ordinary religious administration: it takes part in priest training, issues the graded qualifications a shrine priest needs to be hired, and coordinates a standard liturgical calendar across its roughly eighty thousand member shrines so that major rites fall on the same dates nationwide. Not every Shinto shrine accepts this coordination: Yasukuni Shrine, among a small number of prominent shrines, remains outside Jinja Honcho, administering its own priesthood and calendar independently of the umbrella body most of the country's shrines belong to.