AN IMPORTANT ELEMENT in Shinto is the insistence on purity and cleanliness. The divinities will not descend into an impure space.

That’s one of the reasons Moriyama Mayumi, the first female chief cabinet secretary, was asked to refrain from presenting the Prime Minister’s Cup to a sumo tournament winner inside the ring in 1990—an incident that sparked a national debate. A decade later, then-Osaka Governor Ota Fusae, Japan’s first female governor, was eventually talked out of her request to make the same presentation after the annual official tournament there.

Shinto and sumo are closely linked, and the ring is purified to allow the descent of the divinities. (That’s why the rikishi toss salt into the ring before they enter during a match.) The belief that women were impure was not uncommon in proto-religions throughout the world, and it was grounded in the biological fact of menstruation. One might logically assume, therefore, that Shinto has no female priests—but that assumption would be wrong. That was the case for several decades during the State Shinto period, but it wasn’t true before that, and it isn’t true today. Females were again allowed to enter the Shinto priesthood in 1948, and as of the end of December 2008, 2,899 of the country’s 21,674 priests were women–13% of the total.

Odaira Mika, a priest at the Tenso Shinto shrine in Tokyo’s Itabashi Ward, wondered how it was decided that women were not pure enough to be priests, as reported by the vernacular edition of the Mainichi Shimbun. Mrs. Odaira is also a part-time lecturer at her alma mater, Gakushuin University, formerly a school for children of the Imperial court, later for bluebloods, and now for anyone. She is the author of Josei Shinshoku no Kindai (Female Priests in the Modern Era), and has received an award from an association for Shinto religious studies.

An 1871 government decree prohibited woment from entering the priesthood, and State Shinto (different from the original Shrine Shinto) became the established religion a few years later. Female priests disappeared in just three years, except for a few in Okinawa, where there has been a long tradition of female shamans.

Mrs. Odaira’s university degree is in philosophy, but she has the instincts of a historian. She knew that women had an important role in Shinto until the Meiji Era, so she began researching how their status came to be changed. She examined contemporary public documents and finally discovered the one that contained an explanation of the reason. It read:

“Shinto priests are public officials. Men serve as public officials. If female priests are recognized, it is possible that women will be allowed to become the heads of households, and husbands their spouses (haigusha). This would debase public morality.”

Mrs. Odaira observes:

“The interval from the Meiji Era until the end of the war was an exception. Female priests were inappropriate for the family system the government wanted to institute, in which males were the head of the household. It was an extremely political reason.”

As often happens in Japanese families, she’s a chip off the old block—her father and grandfather were also Shinto priests. After being graduated from Gakushuin, she worked as a clerk at a life insurance company and later returned to university to conduct research. Her father told her she didn’t have to continue the family tradition, but she still chose the Shinto priesthood. She has now attained the rank of negi. “I’ve helped dress miko (shrine maidens) since childhood. It certainly seems as if I’ve taken after my father.”

In her role as negi, Mrs. Odaira conducted the O-Harae (Great Purification Ritual) at the Tenso shrine on 30 December, with 50 parishioners from the neighborhood. (If women were really considered to be impure, how likely is it they’d be allowed to preside over that rite?)

She also performs on the wagon, a six-stringed zither, to accompany miko dances. One of the other musicians is her husband Toru, a bank employee, who plays the taiko drum. When they got married he said he would “absolutely not help” in her work, but he’s not the first man to have been changed by married life. He’s since become a qualified priest with the rank of gonnegi—a negi’s assistant—and plans to leave his job shortly to become a full-time priest.

A century ago, Mr. Odaira would have been considered a haigusha and a threat to public morality. Now he’s going to enter her world, and from a position subordinate to her. No one seems to have a problem with it, least of all Toru.

Concludes the female priest:

“How the Japanese have come into contact with the divinity is reflected in each of the ceremonies. It is a world of depth.”

Afterwords:

Her book 「女性神職の近代」（ぺりかん社）is available on Amazon Japan. It’s just the sort of thing I’d snap up, but it’s JPY 5,000 yen plus for a skoche more than 200 pages, so I’ll have to figure out how to fit it in my book-buying schedule.

The resistance to women entering the sumo ring seems at this point to be based entirely on tradition; i.e., this is how we’ve done it for centuries, so we can’t change now. The prohibition requires the maintenance of several logical fallacies, however, including the fact that according to belief the divinities will have departed the ring by the time a female politician enters to present a trophy. Another is that men are allowed to enter wearing business suits, though that clothing is not ritually pure. Also, the amateur sumo association has sponsored women’s matches for some years now.