When the Mountain Shrines Can No Longer Be Reached

Even in places like northern Tohoku, which I have already visited many times, when I returned last year I came upon mountain shrines I had been able to enter without difficulty in 2020 where depopulation and aging had left no one to tend them; the approach paths were so overgrown with weeds that they had vanished, and I could not even step inside. Holding this trend as lived experience, I sense that the pace of Japan's decline is accelerating faster than I had expected, and I have come to the conviction that unless I move up the schedule I had envisioned and carry out my surveys across the country now, there will be no next time.

Turning all these complex factors over together in my mind, I have concluded that the next three years will be the final window in which nationwide fieldwork can be carried out, and having now completed years of preparation, I have resolved to move into action all at once.

First: how many shrines are there in Japan today? A report released by the Agency for Cultural Affairs in 2023 gives the total across the country as 80,608. That is data from 2022. In 2010 the figure was 86,640. In only about ten years, some 6,000 shrines were lost.

It tells of the first super-aged society in the world, but the occasion of Shinto's decline in fact lies at the start of the modern age. So let us first look at the broad course of the shrine system.

Even now about 80,507 shrines exist across Japan, one of the most numerous religious cultural buildings in the country, more than its Buddhist temples. The great majority of these shrines are overwhelmingly managed by the people of the locality, shrines with a resident priest are said to number only about 20,000, and in fact it is common for one priest to serve several shrines at once.

Going back and forth between city and countryside makes it plain. People in the cities have forgotten the unseen world, and people in the countryside are losing their prayers to the gods. In a sense, I have long felt that the problem hidden in the depths of Japan is less the economic and industrial decline that touches daily life on the surface than a spiritual affliction.

The passing of time has been cruel as well. Descendants of the Awa Inbe they may be, and their family home, the Miki Family Residence, is designated an Important Cultural Property of Japan, yet with the young leaving the countryside for the cities after the war and the depopulation that followed, even the present head of the family was working as a banker in Osaka. He later came back to live in the Miki house and took part in making the Aratae, but it is probably right to say that antiquity has already been lost to modernity.

At first glance, this might look like a dilution of culture. Yet every region where kagura survives is facing severe depopulation; without treating kagura as a cultural resource to draw visitors and revitalize the local economy, the tradition simply could not endure. Originating as a sacred offering to the gods, kagura finds itself constantly negotiating between the preservation of ancient practice and the survival of regional communities.