Shaping a Shrine's Legacy: Kishikawa Masanori / Priest, Kanda Myojin Shrine

"Direct Talk"

Our guest today is Kishikawa Masanori,

a priest at Kanda Myojin Shrine.

Kanda Myojin was founded nearly 1,300 years ago.

Kishikawa also works in the shrine's public relations office.

Under his tenure, the shrine has hosted professional wrestling events,

collaborated with popular anime series,

and created a virtual rendering of the shrine,

all in an effort to get more people to visit.

We asked Kishikawa to share with us

his vision of a Shinto shrine for modern times.

We think of tradition as unchanging.

But it does change over time, without a doubt.

People think of Kanda Myojin

as a bastion of traditional culture, which it is.

But at the same time, it also incorporates contemporary culture.

Kanda Myojin Shrine is located in the heart of Tokyo.

It's a popular destination

where visitors pray for good luck in marriage,

prosperity in business,

and protection from disaster and misfortune.

On this day, the shrine is hosting a live painting event

featuring artist Kojo Masayuki.

I gather up all of my life energy. Then I concentrate it in my core.

It's a ritual I do.

Meanwhile, Kishikawa is relieved

that the weather is relatively mild for a summer day.

Their movements are so intense and dynamic.

So I'm glad it's not too hot.

Kojo unleashes his brush in bold strokes across the blank canvas.

Ten minutes later, he's completed a painting depicting

a famous feudal lord enshrined at Kanda Myojin.

What a powerful performance.

This is my first time seeing something like this.

And at a shrine, no less.

It was amazing seeing the painting come to life.

I would say I was fortunate as I was just walking by

and I heard the sound and was like "What's happening?"

The performance was joyful and I was impressed by the performance.

I think this will be a cool experience for the young generation.

In the past, the shrine has also hosted wrestling matches

organized by a local pro wrestling organization.

A shrine hosting a wrestling match may sound odd.

But surprisingly, it's resonated with people.

It attracts an audience.

The way I approach these things is this.

My number one goal

is for people to make a personal connection with Kanda Myojin.

There are still many people out there

who aren't familiar with this shrine.

So these events are a way to spread awareness.

Kanda Myojin has also partnered with popular anime series

to offer good-luck amulets featuring their characters.

By collaborating with anime, manga, video game series, and so on,

my goal is to get young people to come visit the shrine.

In that respect, it's been a success.

I tell people that we embrace contemporary culture here

because in a hundred years' time

these collaborations will have become part of the shrine's legacy.

The people who come to worship are all modern-day humans.

They're not from the Edo period.

They have modern prayers and dreams.

So we embrace modern culture,

and anime and manga just happen to be part of that.

Kishikawa was born in Tokyo in 1974.

He first encountered Shinto studies

when he enrolled in a Shinto-affiliated high school.

He had chosen the school mainly because it was close to his home.

In high school, I was like most people.

I had this knee-jerk aversion to the word "religion."

There was just something about it I couldn't stomach.

So I had no intention of becoming a priest.

As a high school student, Kishikawa spent most of his free time reading.

I was a voracious reader.

From Japanese literature,

to Agatha Christie detective novels, to essays.

I read anything and everything I could get my hands on.

For one thing, I enjoyed it.

I think also there must have been a part of me

that wanted to become a writer.

Often with things like essays,

I'd scan through the words on the page

without really understanding what I was reading.

But I figured if I read widely, I'd come away the wiser for it.

So I read books of all kinds.

Kishikawa applied to study literature at university, but was rejected.

On the recommendation of a teacher,

he decided to pursue Shinto studies instead.

There, he discovered a topic of great fascination.

I did research on what are called "human deities."

In Shinto, there's a culture of enshrining real people as deities.

I'd gone in with my preconceptions about religion.

So the idea of human beings being enshrined as deities was eye-opening,

it was very intriguing.

That was a completely new concept to me.

Kanda Myojin deifies a tenth-century feudal warlord

named Taira no Masakado.

My advising professor said to me,

if you're going to study human deities,

you have to look into Taira no Masakado.

So I started to do research on him.

Kishikawa's research took him to Kanda Myojin.

Gradually, he built up a rapport with one of the shrine staff.

I'd been visiting Kanda Myojin a number of times,

and each time a public relations representative had been helping me out.

One day, they mentioned to me that there was an opening in their office,

and asked if I'd be interested.

And that's how I first started working at Kanda Myojin.

It taught me that there is such a thing as fate.

I'm here not by my own doing.

Once every two years, Kanda Myojin holds the Kanda Festival,

a grand event to pray for peace and safety

for Tokyo and Japan as a whole.

Impressive portable shrines are paraded through the streets.

As part of his work in the public relations office,

Kishikawa has worked to unravel the history of the shrine.

Looking through old documents,

I came across an old picture scroll depicting the festival.

In the modern Kanda Festival,

we carry these portable shrines on our shoulders and parade them around.

But the scroll shows a procession of floats

that are between four to eight meters tall.

They're on two wheels and being pulled by oxen.

And you can see they're decorated with large figures

and other town symbols.

When you see that,

it's very clear that festivals are different from era to era.

Starting in the late 19th century, you started getting streetcars,

and power lines were being put up all over.

That made it harder to maneuver these huge floats through the streets.

Eventually, around the 1910s and 1920s,

the people of each neighborhood

started making their own portable shrines.

And that was really the beginning of the kind of festivals

we're familiar with today.

In other words, the modern-day festival format is relatively new.

There was a shift from floats to portable shrines.

Perhaps it was a function of the urban setting.

You realize it was thanks to their flexibility

that these festivals are still going on and are as lively as ever.

As Kishikawa studied the picture scroll more closely,

something else caught his eye.

When you look closely,

you see dance platforms and lines of street dancers.

There are these young girls parading down the street.

Girls from about the age of 5 to 16, participating in the procession.

The festival represented a chance for them

to show off the moves they'd been practicing.

These girls studied musical performance,

so you could say that they were semi-professional dancers.

In other words, they're not unlike young girls today

who aspire to become pop idols.

On the Kanda Myojin grounds is a cultural exchange center

that also includes a concert hall.

The venue has hosted performances by many budding pop starlets.

The more you study history,

the more you realize they were doing the same kind of things back then.

If anything, they did it on a grander scale.

They essentially had these starlets

dancing and parading down the streets.

I want to revive that atmosphere of excitement here at the shrine.

Historically speaking, shrines were lively places.

A few centuries ago in the Edo period

every Shinto shrine and Buddhist temple in old Tokyo

served as a kind of center of activity.

Some even had a small theater on-site.

Shrines are not just places of prayer.

There's more to them than that.

I feel like people often see shrines in a very narrow way,

as sacred and restrictive places.

They tend to put shrines in a box.

As part of his efforts to revamp Kanda Myojin,

Kishikawa has also set his sights on visitors from abroad.

He organizes shrine visits for international students,

and gives them a hands-on experience of Shinto and shrine culture.

He also worked with the website "Virtual Akihabara"

to create a virtual rendering of the space.

People around the world can explore the Kanda Myojin grounds online.

At the virtual shrine,

the approach to the main hall is lined with works by Kojo Masayuki.

Whether it's something new, or something old or historical,

the most important thing is to embrace it, to accept it.

Naturally, there will be many cultural elements

that are lost along the way.

But those things that disappear make way for other things,

just like festival floats eventually became portable shrines.

Culture flows continuously, changing to fit the times.

It's important for us to embrace that, and shrines are no exception.

(Do you have any words to live by?)

"New traditions are born out of history."

The more you learn about history,

the more you begin to realize there are really no new things.

All we have, all of the different things we've created,

are based on what we've learned from the past, from history.

We've accumulated all of this history.

And it's not necessarily about paying homage to all of that.

But you should take the time to learn about history.

In my case, that's what serves as the basis

for our collaborations with anime series

and all the different events we host.

The power to make those things happen, comes from the past.

So my hope is that the priests that follow in our footsteps

carry on that legacy and create new traditions.