Kannushi

The Shinto priest is easily misdescribed by analogy with clergy who teach and preach, because the office has very little doctrine to teach and is built around something else entirely.

Purification and offering

A kannushi serves a shrine and the kami enshrined there, and the core of the office is purification and offering: the priest purifies himself, the space and the participants, presents food, sake and other offerings, and recites norito, formal addresses in an archaic register of Japanese. What is being managed is ritual purity, and the ordinary business of the shrine, the purification of a new building site, a car, a business, or a newborn presented at the shrine, follows from that rather than from any doctrine the priest expounds. Shinto has very little doctrine to teach, and the office reflects it.

Certification and who serves

Priests are certified by the Association of Shinto Shrines through its universities, Kokugakuin in Tokyo and Kogakkan in Ise, in ranked grades. Marriage is normal and many shrines pass within families, though the hereditary system was formally abolished when shrines were brought under state administration in the Meiji period. Women serve as kannushi, and their numbers grew substantially after the Second World War when many priests had been killed, though they remain a minority of the total.

From the Meiji government's reorganisation of Shinto in the 1870s until the end of the Second World War, most shrine priests were effectively civil servants of a state-sponsored religious system, State Shinto, in which shrine ranks, priestly appointments and standardised ritual were administered through government ministries as part of a program that fused shrine worship with national and imperial ideology, a status that gave the kannushi an official standing very different from that of clergy in a religion the state does not run.

The Allied Occupation's Shinto Directive of December 1945 ended that arrangement immediately and completely, ordering the total separation of religion from the Japanese state and stripping shrines of government funding and administrative status overnight; shrines across the country reorganised themselves within months into the Association of Shinto Shrines, a private religious corporation that has certified and organised the great majority of kannushi ever since. The kannushi today is therefore a very recent kind of religious professional, formally private and voluntary in a way the office was not for the eighty years before 1945, even though many individual shrine families and their hereditary connections to particular shrines long predate the state system that briefly absorbed them.