Enduring Identities: The Guise of Shinto in Contemporary Japan

Conclusion

243 CONCLUSION The last thing a conclusion should do is to presume to have the final word. While summarizing and restating may be important, I have often gained greater insight when challenged, provoked, and enticed into areas extending beyond the scope of the work at hand. Like a stone thrown into the bounded pool of water of a book’s contents, a conclusion should ripple outward to touch, lap against, and perhaps even disturb the far shore. Although my focus throughout this study has been a single shrine in northern Kyoto, I hope to have shown how its religious idioms are part of a constantly shifting web of social, political, and economic networks that enable certain activities while restricting others. Similar to human agency, the posture, approach, or (returning to the book’s subtitle) guise assumed by a shrine in meeting its responsibilities and challenges varies according to circumstance and audience. Despite a need to adapt constantly to changing social realities, I believe it is still accurate to say the raison d’être of shrine Shinto is to promote, through ritual activities referencing transcendent powers, a sense of continuity, stability, and the management of uncertainty. However, because shrine Shinto rituals rarely follow codified doctrines , reflect explicit theological agendas, or rely on charismatic leaders, these ritual evocations remain open to a variety of interpretations according to the needs, expectations, or politics of those coming to a shrine. Shrine visitors are like visitors to an art gallery; a multiplicity of perspec- tives and meanings are not only possible but essential if the experience is to hold relevance for a viewer’s life. As discussed with regard to the Crow Sumo event, what to the Kamo descendants is an affirmation of their founding myth is to others an entertaining venue that references the elegance of the court, the rich traditions of sumo, or perhaps an individual ’s sense of being Japanese. Another brief look at the shrine’s interlacing relationships will help to orient a closing but by no means final understanding of its position within Japanese society. Chapters 1 and 2 showed how the first of these networks begins with the shrine as a physical yet culturally constituted place. Kamigamo is a neighborhood institution around which a particular clan of people, the Kamo, have formed key concepts and practices about dealing with sacred mysteries and forces, have developed group identity and status around these practices, and have used them to muster political influence with the courtormilitarygovernment.Theyhaveguarded,maintained,and(when necessary) tried to alter the shrine not only to meet their own needs but to put up a protective front for withstanding the frequently violent changes in political leadership throughout Kyoto’s long history. That they represent one of the very few clan-based lineages in Japan still exerting an influence on the affairs of a major shrine (after 1,500 years) indicates the overall success and persistence of their tactics. To many Kamo descendants of the late twentieth century, their continuing duty is nothing less than to protect their heritage as the shrine’s founding clan by perpetuating their ritual expertise and authority in important events such as the miare-sai (because their clan’s ujigami is summoned to the shrine’s sacred mountain) and the running of the horses (where the kami is entertained through their expertise as horsemen). As seen in chapters 4 and 7, their assertion of authority and legitimacy is not always accepted by the shrine’s non-Kamo priestly administration, which seeks to encourage a more broad-based participation by the general public in shrine affairs. To these ends, the shrine’s second network concerns the services it offers . As the large signs at the first and second torii entrances advertising yaku yoke indicate (roughly translated as the prevention of misfortunes at certain stages of a person’s life), the shrine encourages a recognition of culturally shared anxieties about the uncertainties and misfortunes of life and the efficacy of its rituals to somehow ward off these ill effects. Anyone is welcome to contract the shrine’s services, whether to counter personal or financial woes, to nurture individual or group harmony with others , to achieve success in a wide range of endeavors, and so on throughout 244 ENDURING IDENTITIES the expanding realm of human social affairs. As Reader (1991) and others have shown, Japanese religion has also provided a...