Monthly Archives: February 2010

Becoming a Civil Servant

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Yesterday I received a letter from the mayor of Kawasaki, informing me that I had been selected to serve as a representative on the eighth session of the Kawasaki Representative Assembly for Foreign Residents. My term of office starts in April, and runs for two years, until March 2012.

Apparently, while I am a representative, I will be a special local civil servant. I think the “special” part means that I don’t get any of the normal benefits of being a civil servant. You know, pension, secure job, that sort of thing. I do get some money for turning up to meetings, but let’s just say I wouldn’t do this job for the money alone.

The city is holding a meeting to introduce the assembly and the city before the formal first meeting, so I should learn quite a lot about Kawasaki at that point. I also need to work on what I want to discuss at the assembly. I have, as I mentioned, some ideas, but I have held off working on any details until I got the notification. After all, with twice as many applicants as places, there was no guarantee I would get on.

Now I suppose I should point out that when I post on this blog, I am posting in an entirely personal capacity, and my opinions do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the assembly. Sometimes, I might not even believe that they should.

New Immigration System

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Japan is changing its immigration system (probably). The law was passed last July, and within three years of that it will be brought into force by cabinet order. There is an article on the Japanese Immigration website about it, which is my source for what I’m writing here. That article is in Japanese, and has a helpful set of questions and answers.

The main change is that instead of the current Alien Registration Cards, or Gaijin Cards, there will be new IC-chip cards, issued directly by the Ministry of Justice. The card will carry basically the same information as the current ARC, although some information has been cut. It looks, for example, as if your region of birth and place of residence in your country of citizenship have gone. In the latter case, that’s very sensible, as long-term resident foreigners don’t have a place of residence in their country of citizenship. It will still have a photograph on it, but apparently the plan is to issue it when you enter the country, so maybe they plan to take your photo for you as soon as you step off the plane. Some or all of the information on the card will be recorded on the IC chip, but maybe not all of it. The web pages are clearly unclear on this; they explicitly say “all or some” of the information.

This has also changed the way you notify changes in details. Main details, like your name and citizenship, have to be notified to the immigration office. Interestingly, the page explicitly lists changes of sex as something you have to report to the immigration office. I have no idea whether the Japanese government recognises transexual Japanese citizens, but apparently they do recognise transexual foreigners. Of course, they also say that you should notify changes in your date of birth to the immigration office. I am truly at a loss to work out how that could happen; discovering an error in the initial registration? (Actually, I suppose that if you were a refugee, you might not, initially, know, and later find out.) Your address still has to be notified to the local municipal office, just as now, but apparently you won’t have to do it in person any more.

They’ve also added a few new situations that can get you chucked out of the country. Lying on your applications, lying about or failing to report your change of address within 90 days, not actually living with your “spouse” for over six months, and so on. It looks like these are basically there to close loopholes in the current law that made it difficult to deport people who had clearly broken the rules. On the other hand, there are quite a few exceptions for “good reasons”, such as fear that your abusive spouse will continue to beat you up, or your employer suddenly went bankrupt, throwing you out on the street. They’ve also added rules allowing them to deport people for helping other people enter the country illegally, which makes sense.

They also say that they are looking into making it possible to report changes to the immigration office by post or over the internet. This is important for people living on, say, Hachijojima, who would be quite a long way from the local immigration office. At the moment, you have to go in person, but the plan is to remove that requirement.

However, you are required to carry your Residence Card at all times, and your passport is not a substitute. That means that, if they do set it up to allow changes by post, they won’t be able to require you to submit your current card with your change notification, and will have to send you a new one first. No doubt this is one of the problems they are working on.

It is worth noting that this addresses the biggest practical problem that occurred to me when I heard about the system; some people live a long way from the nearest immigration office (I don’t), and if they had had to register all changes there it would have been a serious hassle. If you can do address changes locally and the others by post, that basically solves that problem. When I blogged about this in Japanese, I observed that I expected them to solve the issue, because they normally do.

There are also some concrete benefits for resident foreigners. First, the longer visas are all likely to be extended from three years to five years, and the student visa length has been extended to the length of a university course. I imagine the latter is going to be very helpful to students. (They say they are still investigating exactly which visas will be extended, but that basically all the three year ones will be.) Your residence card will have the same duration as your visa, unlike the current ARC, which has a completely independent five year duration, and you will get your new residence card when they put the new visa in your passport. This, incidentally, removes the need to go and tell the municipal office when you get your visa extended. Permanent residents will have seven-year cards. At the moment, it looks as though you will have to apply for a new one, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they change that to sending them out automatically. After all, they know they have your latest address, and if they don’t, so you don’t get the card, they can deport you anyway, and it’s less hassle for them to do it automatically. They can just program the computer to spit it out. It will need a way to apply if you don’t get one, but you’d need that anyway.

The visa length extension bit made the news. The other benefit doesn’t seem to have, and I haven’t noticed the expat community being aware of it.

The re-entry permit system is basically being abolished. If you have a valid passport and residence card, you will not need a re-entry permit if you leave Japan for less than a year (less than two years for special permanent residents). If you want to go for longer, you will need to get a re-entry permit, just like now, but it will be good for five years, rather than three (six, for special permanent residents). There may also be special situations in which you still need a permit; those haven’t been decided yet.

Note: this system is not yet in force. You still need a re-entry permit at the moment.

Some people have privacy worries about the IC chip (there are concerns over just how remotely it can be read; maybe you should carry the card wrapped in tin foil), but if the MoJ does its job properly and makes sure that it can only be read by people who are entitled to do so, I don’t see that it adds much to the current rules. Apart from that, it looks like these changes will all make life easier for people who are in Japan legally.

Shrine Shinto Confronts Internationalisation, Part One

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Last Sunday (February 21st, just in case this draft takes longer than anticipated and I forget to edit the beginning) I attended a small symposium at Kokugakuin University on the subject “Shrine Shinto Confronts Internationalisation”. I found out about it because Professor Havens, one of the participants, posted about it on the English-language Shinto mailing list I’m on, and since it was free, local, and very relevant to my interests, I got my wife’s permission to disappear for a day, and went along.

It was extremely interesting. Shrine Shinto as a whole has no unified approach to internationalisation, it would seem, which is hardly surprising, as individual shrines are very independent. However, the speakers told us about their experiences, activities, and research, which shed quite a lot of light on the question.

The first two speakers were the chief priests of shrines in Hawaii. These shrines were founded by Japanese immigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and both of the priests had been sent out from Japan to lead the shrines. One has since taken US citizenship, which requires him to renounce his Japanese citizenship according to the laws of both countries, so he is now a non-Japanese Shinto priest; an example of internationalisation all by himself.

The first one to speak was Revd Takizawa, the chief priest of Hawaii Kotohira Jinsha – Hawaii Dazaifu Tenmangu. (I know it’s normally “jinja”, but the shrine spells it “jinsha” on their home page, and it’s their name.) He was born in Nagoya, but apparently worked in Hawaii for a while before training as a priest. He was sent back to Hawaii, to lead the shrine, in 1994.

At that time, very few of the third-generation Japanese Americans were attending the shrine, and the surrounding area was not good, with a lot of crime and drug problems. The shrine was holding three events per year, at New Year and the two main festivals, and about a thousand people attended on New Year’s.

He started work right away on raising the shrine’s profile. He got involved in local community activities, trying to address the local problems, so that people knew there was a shrine there. He also increased the number of events that the shrine held, so that people would be less likely to forget about it. A guiding idea behind this was the desire to introduce Japanese culture to people in Hawaii. Thus, they started serving o-zoni, traditional Japanese New Year food, at the New Year festival. They also got some children’s kimonos, and provided free kimono rental to children attending the seven-five-three festival in November. We saw some photographs of that, and some of the children were clearly not of Japanese descent. If I’m reading my notes correctly, about 400 people did 7-5-3 last year.

In August, to go with the start of the American academic year, the shrine holds a Back to School ceremony, which is appropriate for a Tenmangu, as those are shrines dedicated to Sugawara no Michizane, a kami of scholarship. In June, they hold the summer grand purification, but with a twist: they do purification for pets, as well. That seems to be very popular, judging from the photographs of the people attending.

As a result of this, he said that they now get about 10,000 people on New Year’s, although he also said that the core group of volunteers helping to run the shrine is only ten people. Mind you, that proportion sounds about right to me. He also has a second priest, also sent from Japan, working at the shrine, and training to take over when the Rev Takizawa retires. From the sounds of things, that shrine is thriving.

The second speaker was the chief priest of Hilo Daijingu, Rev Watanabe. He has naturalised as a US citizen, so he is now a non-Japanese Shinto priest. However, he was born in Niigata Prefecture and trained in Japan, and apparently spoke no English when he went over to Hawaii. Apparently, when he applied for his visa, the US immigration department pointed out that the shrine where he was working then and Hilo Daijingu enshrined different kami, and wondered whether he was really the same religion as the shrine he was supposed to work at. He got round that by having two lawyers, one an expert in immigration law and the other an expert on religious law (and one of them the son of the former chief priest of one of the Hawaiian shrines), who convinced immigration that Shinto isn’t divided by kami.

Although the shrine is called Hilo Great Shrine (Daijingu), it’s actually quite a small shrine, the same sort of scale as a neighbourhood shrine in Japan, and that’s the atmosphere that Revd Watanabe says that he aims for. It is, however, the only shrine on Hawaii’s Big Island, which is apparently about half the size of Shikoku, but with a much lower population. He said that, although people are very spread out, there’s a strong community in the sense that everyone knows everyone else, particularly within the Japanese-American community.

Hilo Daijingu gets about 4000 people at New Year’s, and holds Tsukinamisai twice a month, on the first and fifteenth. About 40 families attend on the first, about 10 on the fifteenth. Most of the attendees are older people, but the number hasn’t changed over the ten years he’s been there. Although some people have died, others have retired and started attending. About 90 families come to the Great Purifications, and he does about 20 to 30 petitions per month.

They have a garage sale in the shrine every year, which serves two purposes. First, it’s something for the organising committee to do, meaning that the meetings have more substance, and they get to know each other better. Second, it gives people who do not think of themselves as Shinto a reason to visit the shrine, and the feeling that they can enter the grounds. He also holds ceremonies on the US public holidays that aren’t specifically Christian, like Independence Day.

Revd Watanabe says that he tries to talk to anyone who comes into the shrine grounds, to make them feel welcome. Japanese tourists sometimes come, and it’s apparently often the first time they’ve spoken to a Shinto priest. He says that he wants to make people feel that they want to go back to a shrine, whether Hilo Daijingu or one nearer home back in Japan.

This shrine also seems to be doing quite well. However, it was noticeable from the photographs that most of the people seriously involved with the shrines looked to be of Japanese descent. Revd Watanabe explicitly mentioned that Japanese Americans form most of the attendees at ceremonies. These shrines seem to be good examples of religions that have travelled with immigrants, and while both sound like they are very healthy at the moment, I do wonder whether their appeal will spread beyond the Japanese American community, or even whether they want it to.

This has got quite long, so I’ll break here, and post about the other speakers later.

Mortgage

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Today I signed the contract for my mortgage. Apart from well and truly confirming that I am now middle-aged, why is this significant?

Well, I got it from a big Japanese bank (Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ (MUFG), one of the three megabanks), I’m foreign, and I don’t have permanent residence. According to received wisdom in the expat community here, that should have made it impossible. And yet I signed (strictly, stamped my hanko on) all the contracts today. The money will be there when I buy the flat, I have 35 years to pay it back, and the interest rate is barely over 1%; I got a discounted rate because I only borrowed 80% of the value of the property.

That seems to be the only thing that really mattered; it was the condition that the estate agents passed on when talking about the application.

I am married to a Japanese citizen, and she has signed the guarantor papers. However, as far as I can tell, that was only because we are going to jointly own the flat, and thus I can’t secure a mortgage on it without her agreement. They certainly didn’t require any evidence of her income, which is probably just as well; in the most recent year we can provide evidence for, she earned nothing, because she hadn’t gone back to work. And even now, three days a week part-time wouldn’t pay the mortgage. Indeed, we had to fill the application forms in again, because the initial forms were sent out on the assumption that I would be the sole owner of the flat, so only I signed them. The mortgage contract itself is purely in my name.

I’m also not employed on a massive salary by a major company. In fact, I’m self-employed, and earn less than the average Japanese salary. (Not vastly less, mind you, but less.) I do have three years of stable income from self-employment to show, which I imagine was important. Certainly, they asked for evidence of that, and were quite particular about the form of the evidence.

I’m not aware of any personal connection to important executives at MUFG. Of course, my students sometimes turn out to have surprising connections, but I hadn’t mentioned this to any of them, so I think we can rule that out.

On the other hand, the estate agents said that MUFG was the only bank that would give me a mortgage without permanent residence, and as far as I can tell from their flyers they normally work with the Bank of Yokohama, so presumably there was a problem with them. So, speculating, MUFG may have changed their policy so that they offer mortgages to foreign residents who look likely to stay put, regardless of their current visa status (as long as they have one; I had to produce my Alien Registration Card). It could be limited to people married to a Japanese citizen, but my wife’s involvement appears to have depended entirely on that fact that she will be a joint owner of the flat, so maybe not.

The application process was fairly smooth and painless. As I mentioned, it took a couple of attempts to get the application forms right, and I sent some documents they didn’t want, so I had to send the right ones afterwards. The only personal contact was a phone call from the security company backing the mortgage. It went as follows.

“This is the MUFG mortgage guarantee company. Am I talking to David Chart?”

“Yes.”

“Did you apply for a mortgage of umptymumble yen over 35 years?”

“Yes.”

“Please tell me your address.”

“Here you go: [address]”

“And your date of birth.”

“[Date of birth].”

“Thank you very much. We will take the application forward.”

(My address and date of birth were both, of course, on the application forms; those questions were presumably to confirm that they really were talking to me.)

Obviously, the whole conversation was in Japanese, and the estate agents said that the bank wouldn’t lend money to a foreigner who couldn’t speak Japanese, so maybe that was the most important language exam I’ve ever taken. Fortunately, it was really, really easy. (Thinking about it, no-one at the bank today asked whether I could understand Japanese or read kanji; they just took it for granted. Maybe it’s a formal condition. If so, I don’t know why, nor what their standard for “can speak Japanese” is.)

In any case, the concrete fact is that MUFG has given a standard-terms 35 year 80% mortgage to a self-employed foreigner without permanent residence. If you’re a foreigner trying to get a mortgage in Japan, I suggest giving MUFG a try.

Kamimeguro Hikawa Shrine

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A torii on a flight of steps sandwiched between a building and a wall

The back entrance to the shrine

Kamimeguro Hikawa Shrine is a fairly ordinary urban shrine, its precincts sandwiched between high buildings and lacking in old, impressive trees. “Kamimeguro” is the name of the area, and the “kami” just means “upper”; it is, apparently, not connected to the word for Shinto kami, although quite a lot of people have thought it was. (The evidence relies on technical arguments about sound changes in Japanese in the eighth century; apparently the two “kami”s originally had different “i” sounds. Not everyone is completely convinced.)

The main shrine building at Kamimeguro Hikawa Shrine

The main shrine building, with flags for the first visit of the New Year outside.

The Hikawa shrines are only found around Tokyo, and the overwhelming majority are in Tokyo and Saitama prefectures. There are one or two in the other adjacent prefectures, and none further away. This sort of situation is fairly common in Shinto; particular shrine groups tend to be found in a local area. Indeed, about the only shrine group that is truly national is the Hachiman group; even Inari seems to have a significant bias towards eastern Japan. This does mean that you cannot walk around visiting the shrines in one area to get a sense of which types of shrine are important; that will just tell you what is important near you.

The reason I was talking about shrine groups rather than kami is that the main kami of the Hikawa shrines is Susano-o no mikoto, the younger brother of Amaterasu ÅŒmikami, who is enshrined in many other places as well. For example, he is the main kami of the Gion shrines, which tend to be found in western Japan, and of several shrines in Shimane prefecture, on the Japan Sea coast. Indeed, “Hikawa” is thought to come from the Hi river in Shimane, which is closely associated with Susano-o’s legends. However, traditions and festivals seem to be more often associated with the shrine type than directly with the kami, so it is generally more useful to keep track of the shrine type.

An additional complication is that sometimes the kami is not the same in all shrines of the same type, and even when it is that is sometimes just a result of Meiji period rationalisation. Another result of such rationalisation can be seen at this shrine. As well as Susano-o, the shrine enshrines Amaterasu and Tenjin, Sugawara no Michizane. Now, while Amaterasu is connected to Susano-o, Tenjin is not, and is only here because he was moved from another local shrine, one that was being closed down, in the Meiji period.

The shrine precincts also include an Inari shrine and a Sengen shrine. The Sengen shrines are dedicated to the kami of Mount Fuji, and thus are only common in areas from which Mount Fuji can be seen. The presence of other shrines in the shrine grounds, called sessha (for shrines to kami closely connected to the main kami, in theory) or massha (for other kami), is quite common. The Grand Shrines of Ise cover 125 shrines if you add up all of the sessha and massha, although some have special names in that case. Some sessha and massha are even outside the shrine grounds, sometimes quite a long way away. These days, I think that the key point is that the sessha and massha are not independent religious corporations; they are administered by the corporation of the main shrine.

Because of my route, I entered the shrine through the rear entrance, and left from the front. The stone steps at the front are almost two hundred years old, and lead to and from the ÅŒyama Kaidō, but as soon as you reach the top of the steps, the fact that you are in the heart of Tokyo is inescapable. There’s something about triple-decker roads that destroys any sense of peaceful isolation.

Steps going down next to a tall building, towards triple layers of roads

Little of the traffic visits the shrine these days.

Interview

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On Sunday, I was interviewed for the Kawasaki City Representative Assembly for Foreign Residents. In the past, the normal situation has apparently been that they have had trouble finding enough people, but this time they had around fifty applicants, and the assembly has a maximum membership of about twenty five. Thus, I suppose, the need for interviews to help decide between the people who had applied. That said, the interviews were only ten minutes long, so while they would be fine for confirming Japanese ability (important, since that’s the language of the meetings), I’m not sure how much they could learn in depth about the candidates.

The questions were much as I expected. Some were practical, about my Japanese ability and whether I intended to move out of Kawasaki or take Japanese citizenship. Obviously, those are all basic requirements for the post. They also wanted to know what I wanted to do on the assembly.

There are two things. First, I’d like to investigate the possibility of doing a proper survey on the problems that foreigners living in Kawasaki encounter. I don’t think there’s any hard data on what the real problems are, which makes any policies a bit of a shot in the dark.

Second, I’d like to look at things the city can afford to do to help foreigners integrate better into Japanese society. The language is obviously a big one, but I don’t know what the city can actually afford to do to help with that; language lessons are expensive, and volunteer lessons expensive to organise. Still, if I’m chosen for the committee, I have two years to look into things before we have to produce concrete suggestions.

Because of the number of candidates, it might, apparently, be March before we know whether we’ve been chosen. I might have moved by then! (Although not out of Kawasaki…)

Mitake Shrine, Miyamasu

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The first actual shrine that I passed walking along the Ōyama Kaidō was Mitake (mee-ta-kay) Shrine, on Miyamasu Hill in Shibuya. This is the main road on the opposite side of the station from the famous junction with the enormous screens that it almost always used as an establishing shot of Tokyo in foreign films. It is, therefore, about as urban as an area can get, and the shrine is squeezed in between two large buildings, one of which is a main post office. As is often the case, there is a flight of stone steps up from the street to the main precincts of the shrine.

There are three things that struck me as unusual about this shrine, but as the shrine office was closed and, in any case, I couldn’t spend too long there if I was going to get to the end of the day’s route, I wasn’t able to check in detail. At some point I may go back, since it isn’t very far away, and try to find out.

The shrine precincts, with the buildings visible beyond the torii and tall buildings to either side.

The shrine precincts. Note the buildings to either side, and that the whole surface seems to be paved.

You may be able to tell from the photograph of the precincts, but, in addition to being squeezed between buildings, the shrine looks rather as though it is on top of a building; the structures to the side seem to be built into the “ground”, not next to it, and all of the surface is paved. This is surprising because, according to one of the lecturers at Kokugakuin a few years ago, the basic rule of the Association of Shinto Shrines is that a shrine must be “On the earth, under the sky”. A shrine on a building or inside is, as far as the Association is concerned, just a glorified kamidana. So, most shrines are built directly on the ground. Now, Mitake Shrine may be, in fact, on a hill. The bits of the hill to either side could have been carved away to make room for the buildings; that’s fairly common in Japanese cities. On the other hand, it might not be recognised by the Association; there is no law requiring shrines to have such recognition, and, indeed, some very famous ones (Meiji JingÅ«, Fushimi Inari) are not. Either way, the absence of an obvious natural earth surface under foot is unusual.

Three stone Buddhist images

The images of Fudō Myo-ō enshrined in the precincts.

The second unusual point is the presence of an image of Fudō Myo-ō in the shrine grounds. According to the notice next to it, this image has been worshipped in the area since the late seventeenth century, and it is a Buddhist image. Now, as I have mentioned before, in the late nineteenth century the government required that all Buddhist images be removed from shrines. Unlike Toyokawa Inari, Mitake Shrine is clearly a shrine, which raises the question of why it has a Buddhist image.

One possibility is that it was moved to the shrine after the second world war, as a result of the development of the area around Shibuya station. That sort of thing happens quite a lot; there are a number of religious images noted in the Ōyama Kaidō guidebook as having been moved from their original sites due to building and development.

Another possibility arises from another historical event recorded on a big noticeboard at the shrine. In 1870, the Meiji Emperor made a royal progress from the palace, and on the way out and back he stopped at Mitake Shrine for a rest, paying his respects at the shrine. If the Fudō Myo-ō was near the shrine at that time, and the Emperor paid his respects to it as well, it would be difficult to move it away. So, it might have been just outside the shrine, thus formally within the law, and protected by an imperial association.

Whatever the history, the fact remains that the Buddhist image is now clearly within the shrine precincts, although there is a second torii between the small shrine for the image and the main hall of the shrine. Whether or not this can actually be called Shinto-Buddhist syncretism, given that, as far as I could see, it was just a matter of physical proximity, it is still a reminder of the close links between Shinto and Buddhism.

A bronze statue of a dog or wolf.

The open-mouthed koma-inu.

The final point concerns the koma-inu. Although the name means “Korea Dogs”, these statues normally look nothing like dogs. Rather, they look rather like lions, with curly hair and, occasionally, horns. They stand in a pair in front of the shrine buildings, protecting them from evil influences, one with its mouth open and the other with its mouth closed. At Inari shrines, the koma-inu are almost invariably replaced by foxes, and at Hie shrines they are sometimes replaced by monkeys. In both cases, these are the animals particularly associated with kami in question. On the other hand, I’ve never seen a Tenjin shrine that uses cattle, or a Hachiman shrine that uses doves (the animal associated with the kami of scholarship is the cow, that associated with the kami of war is the dove).

As you can see from the photograph, the koma-inu at this shrine look a lot like dogs, or possibly wolves. “Mitake” refers to a sacred mountain, and wolves used to live in Japan’s mountains, so it is possible that the animals associated with the kami of this shrine are wolves, and that the koma-inu are wolves. Alternatively, since there are no formal rules for how they look, the chief priest of this shrine, or the donor, may just have decided to make them look like dogs. In any case, this is definitely unusual.

Toyokawa Inari Tokyo Betsuin

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The main building of the temple, and the approach.

It's a temple, not a shrine

The first shrine I visited on my walk along the Ōyama Kaidō last month was not, in fact, a shrine at all, at least not strictly speaking. Toyokawa Inari Tokyo Betsuin is formally a Zen Buddhist temple. It is also, very clearly, an Inari establishment, and Inari is almost always a Shinto kami.

A vermillion torii and avenue of prayer flags

Don't be fooled; this is not a shrine

So, what’s going on? From around the eighth century to the nineteenth, the borders between Shinto and Buddhism were extremely ill-defined, with many practices and people shifting from one to the other. A lot of early Shinto theology, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, was written by Buddhist monks, for example, and reading Buddhist sutras to held kami achieve nirvana was also very common. The most famous manifestation of this, however, was the doctrine of Honji Suijaku, which said that the kami were local, Japanese manifestations of Buddhist deities. The inverse doctrine, holding that Buddhist deities were different manifestation of the kami, was also popularised by some Shinto priests.

In the late nineteenth century, however, the Meiji government declared that Shinto and Buddhism were clearly separate, issuing a law, the Shinbutsu Bunri Rei, or Law to Separate Kami and Buddhas, which said that all religious institutions and practitioners had to choose to be either Shinto or Buddhist.

The Inari cult started at Fushimi Inari Shrine in Kyoto in the early eighth century, but when KÅ«kai, the founder of Shingon Buddhism, founded Tōji nearby in the late eighth century, he adopted the kami as a protector of his sect’s temples. As a result, many Inari shrines were founded with strong Buddhist elements. Nevertheless, in the Meiji period almost all chose to become shrines, getting rid of much of the Buddhism.

Toyokawa Inari, in Aichi prefecture, was an exception, and it became a Buddhist temple. The one I visited in Akasaka is technically a part of that temple. Karen Smyers did part of her research for The Fox and the Jewel at the one in Aichi, which she says has few obvious foxes. That is not the case in the Tokyo temple.

The combination of Shinto and Buddhist elements was very interesting. The main building did not have a torii, but it did have two fox statues in front of it, like the koma-inu at a shrine. The shrine building at the end of the path marked by the large red torii was built like a shrine, but the items inside were Buddhist style. Similarly, the dedication on the stone at the centre of the crowd of fox statues was to Dakiniten, the Buddhist deity who was assimilated to Inari, not to Inari directly.

A statue of a fox in front of an incense burner

The stone fox looks like it belongs in a shrine, but the incense burner behind it is definitely temple furniture

There were quite a lot of fox statues around, some of them next to distinctively Buddhist items, such as an incense burner. There was also a complete set of statues of the seven gods of good fortune, behind some shrine buildings. The seven gods of good fortune are derived from Shinto, Buddhism, and Hinduism, at least, so they are even more complex than most elements of Japanese religion.

It is interesting to speculate that, two hundred years ago, most Shinto shrines were like this, with sutras being chanted before the kami and incense burned, while monks went about their business. However, Toyokawa Inari had no miko, and even two hundred years ago a shrine would have had them, so this is no more a relic of pre-Meiji practices than any other location. It does, however, provide evidence that the syncretic practices were not completely suppressed by the Meiji law, and were ready to reappear when, eighty years later, the law was repealed by the occupying Americans.

Lots of stone fox statues, arranged on stone shelves

I can't think why so many people think Inari is a fox

Natural Helper Cells

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All animals have some way to fight off infections by bacteria, viruses, and parasites. If they didn’t, they would soon die. In mammals, this system is quite complex, and includes two main branches. One, the adaptive immune system, learns about infections the first time they are encountered, and then can deal with them quickly if they come back. This is the system that is used in vaccination. The other system, the innate immune system, has a fixed set of responses, and deals with things that look like they might be dangerous, even though the body has never encountered them before. Today’s paper, by a team led by Kazuyo Moro and Shigeo Koyasu at Keio Medical School, reports more discoveries about the innate immune system.

The immune system includes cells called helper T-cells, which secrete substances, called cytokines, that provoke strong immune responses. If these cells respond to the wrong sort of thing, it can cause serious allergies, and an over-reaction can be fatal, leading to a so-called cytokine storm. There are two main types of helper T-cells, as far as I can tell from this article, TH1 and TH2. However, in the years since they were discovered, many cell types have been found to perform a similar function to TH2 cells, so that the name is now being used to refer to a function, rather than a cell type.

This paper reports the discovery of a new group of TH2-type cells, fat-associated lymphocyte clusters (FALCs), which are clusters of fat cells and natural helper cells, a kind of lymphocyte, found along blood vessels near the intestines. The cells seem to be involved in, at least, responding to parasitic infections of the gut, provoking other cells to react in a way that clears the parasites out of the gut. The authors call them natural helper cells, as they have none of the characteristics of T cells.

So, why is this important? Well, an entirely new class of immune cells is a significant discovery. It’s important to understand the immune system as a whole, and in order to do that we need to know what cells make it up. The better we understand the immune system, the better we can handle it when treating infections and the like. Of course, as the cells have only just been discovered, their full importance is not yet known, so the ultimate significance of this discovery is still uncertain. Science is often like that.

Natural helper cells (Editor’s summary)

Immunology: The expanding TH2 universe (News and Views article: Nature 463, 434-435 (28 January 2010) | doi:10.1038/463434a; Published online 27 January 2010)

Innate production of TH2 cytokines by adipose tissue-associated c-Kit+Sca-1+ lymphoid cells (Original paper: Nature 463, 540-544 (28 January 2010) | doi:10.1038/nature08636; Received 6 October 2009; Accepted 5 November 2009; Published online 20 December 2009)

A Year in the Life of a Shinto Shrine

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Here we have another example of a book that does what it says on the cover; a recounting of one year’s festivals and activities at a Shinto shrine, together with comments from various of the priests on matters connected to Shinto, Japan, and the shrine’s operation. The writing is clear and lively, and it gives, I think, a very good idea of what contemporary Shinto is actually like. I would definitely recommend it to anyone who wants to get an insight into the practice of the religion.

However, I do have a few caveats. The book appears to be highly accurate on areas I know about, so I’m inclined to trust his account of the shrine, as he was actually living there and attending the rituals. The biggest error I noticed was in the glossary, where he says that the colour of the hakama worn by priests depends on their rank within the shrine, whether chief priest, senior priest, or whatever. Actually, the colour of the hakama depends on a separate ranking system, but in practice it does seem to correlate closely with rank at the shrine. However, a chief priest at a small shrine might only get the hakama that the assistant chief priests get at his topic shrine. As I said, the book is highly accurate; I think you’d probably have to read the Association of Shinto Shrines regulations to be aware of this distinction, and even then you might elide it in a book.

A larger concern is that the book does not, I think, make it sufficiently clear that his account applies to one shrine, Suwa Shrine in Nagasaki. This is quite a major shrine, associated with one of the largest festivals in Japan, and it has a large staff of priests. To take one example, he refers to the reverence towards Ise as a standard part of rituals. I don’t doubt that it was a standard part of rituals there, but I have never seen it done as part of a ritual. My local shrine doesn’t do it, and I haven’t noticed it in the festivals I’ve attended at other shrines. Maybe it’s a Kyushu custom (Nagasaki is in Kyushu), or maybe it was just the chief priest of that shrine who thought it was a good idea. The rituals and festivals reported in this book are a good example of the sort of thing that happens at a shrine, but the details are not necessarily true of anywhere apart from Suwa Shrine in Nagasaki, and I think that could have been rather more emphasised.

A related concern is Nelson’s attribution of particular interpretations of the rituals to the attendees in general. In some cases, this may be based on interviews with them afterwards, but even so he does seem to generalise more than I’m comfortable with. He quite rightly emphasises that Shinto rituals do not include sermons that specify a particular interpretation, so there is no way to know how most attendees interpret the ritual words and actions.

My criticism is not that the book fails to reflect the diversity of Shinto; that would be asking for the book to be a different book. Rather, I think it fails to make clear that it is only describing one small part of Shinto, and that other shrines are different in many ways. If you read the book bearing that in mind, it is an excellent introduction to Shinto as it is actually practised.