SACRED AND SOCIAL SPACE: A SHINTO SHRINE IN SHINJUKU, TOKYO A THESIS Presented to The Faculty of the Asian Studies Program The Colorado College In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Bachelor of Arts By Anika Grevstad May 2018 ii" On my honor, I have neither given nor received any unauthorized aid on this assignment. Anika Grevstad " iii" STUDENT THESIS ADVISORS Each Asian Studies Major must have two readers for the thesis. One of these must be an Asian Studies CC faculty member*; the Second Reader will be chosen from among CC faculty. In the event that there is a non-CC faculty member who is more appropriate as a second reader, the student must make a special application to the Asian Studies Committee to have this person designated as the Second Reader. This page must be signed and submitted by the end of Block 2 if the student is graduating in May. If the student is graduating mid-year, this must be signed and submitted by the end of Block 7 of the previous academic year. If the student has not chosen a Second Reader by the designated time, the Asian Studies faculty members will appoint the Second Reader in consultation with the student. Student Name: Anika Grevstad Name of First Reader: Joan Ericson Signature of agreement by the First Reader Date Name of Second Reader: David Gardiner Signature of agreement by the Second Reader Date * Tamara Bentley, Tracy Coleman, Joan Ericson, David Gardiner, Hong Jiang, Vibha Kapuria- Foreman, Purvi Mehta, John Williams, and Peter Wright. " iv" " v" Table of Contents List of Figures……………………………………………………………………1 Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………2 Introduction………………………………………………………………………3 Section I: Hanazono Shrine’s Visitors …………………………………………9 Section II: Social Exchanges and Interactive Community………………………17 Section III: Third place as Ritual Space and Ideological Community …………26 Conclusion ………………………………………………………………………36 Appendix (Figures)………………………………………………………………38 Endnotes …………………………………………………………………………43 Bibliography .……………………………………………………………………45 " 1" List of Figures Figure 1: Satellite image of Hanazono Shrine side entrance ……………………………….38 Figure 2: Map of Hanazono Shrine …………………………………………………………38 Figure 3: Map of Shinjuku from the Edo Period ……………………………………………39 Figure 4: Aerial Photograph of Hanazono Shrine, 1947 ……………………………………39 Figure 5: Aerial Photograph of Hanazono Shrine, 1963 ……………………………………39 Figure 6: Aerial Photograph of Hanazono Shrine, 2017 ……………………………………40 Figure 7: Photograph of the line to main shrine on New Years, 2018………………………40 Figure 8: Photograph of the line stretching to the street on New Years, 2018………………41 Figure 9: Photograph of the line to main shrine at night, 2018...……………………………41 Figure 10: Photograph of New Years food stalls, 2018 .……………………………………42 " 2" Acknowledgements I would like to thank the Asian Studies Program at Colorado College. I would especially like to thank Professor Joan Ericson for her knowledge and advising throughout the past four years and during this thesis process, and Professor David Gardiner for his feedback as my second reader. I would like to extend my gratitude to the Gaylord Prize in Asian Studies and the Keller Family Venture Grant for funding my research, to Mari Young and Ben Kieklak for their support in the field, and to the 2018 Asian Studies Seniors for their comments throughout the process. As always, thank you to my family and friends for their continued support throughout my academic journey. " 3" Introduction On a warm summer evening in late June of 2016, as I began to meander home from the heart of Tokyo’s Shinjuku district to my lodgings in the nearby Yotsuya san chome neighborhood, a curious sight caught my eye from across the busy street. Tucked between tall concrete buildings, convenience stores, and upstairs offices was a narrow tree-lined alley (Fig. 1). The end of this alley, I soon found, opened into a wide space housing leafy trees, many red torii gates, and a long staircase up to a main shrine. I could still hear the rush of cars and commuters no more than twenty feet away, but it felt as if I had stepped through the torii gates into another world. This shrine, called Hanazono Shrine (, Hanazono Jinja) stood in sharp contrast to the bustling, high-tech, metropolitan center in which it sat. What I found most surprising as I watched the sun set behind the shrine’s red roof was the number of people who continued to come and go as the sky turned darker, walking up the stairs to pray, sitting on the steps to look out across the grounds, and talking in hushed voices to their families. I began to wonder, how has this shrine, which hails from the days before Tokyo was called Tokyo, dating to the first shogun and feudal lords, kept its place in one of modern day Tokyo’s busiest urban areas? As I watched families and groups of friends talking to one another as they walked the grounds, I also began to wonder if perhaps the role of urban shrines could be not only spiritual, but also social. How might the sacred and social intersect amidst otherwise largely individualistic lives in a dense urban setting? My approach to these questions has been shaped by the concept of “third places,” places outside of home and work that foster day-to-day social interactions. Ray Oldenburg coined this concept in his 1989 book, The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts, and how they Get You through the Day. My study examines how the qualities of third place that Oldenburg lays out apply to Hanazono Shrine and expands Oldenburg’s idea of a third place to include public spaces that also hold a ritual role. " 4" Oldenburg defines “third places” as “core settings of informal public life,” “a great variety of public places that host the regular, voluntary, informal, and happily anticipated gatherings of individuals beyond the realms of home and work” (16). These third places counter what Oldenburg sees as the “two-stop model of daily routine” in America, that is, the focus on solely home and work that comes about because of increasing individualism and privatization of living (9). In urbanizing societies, new businesses tend to “emphasize fast service, not slow and easy relaxation” in a reflection of this “two-stop model” (Oldenburg 9). The trend towards a “two-stop” life model might occur anywhere where small towns, with their pedestrian-friendly streets and local hangouts, are replaced with skyscraper office-buildings and commuter train lines. Tokyo, especially, is notorious as a city of office jobs, long work hours, and long commutes; according to a survey by the NHK Culture Research Institute, the average Tokyo citizen spends over an hour and a half commuting each day, and over 40 percent of men work 50 hours a week or more (Murata and Aramaki 2016). Presumably, such long hours spent at work and in commute leave little time for frequent social activities elsewhere. Oldenburg’s examples of third places are social, conversational places including pubs, barbershops, cafes, and beer gardens in America and Europe. These sorts of lively spaces certainly exist in Japan as well: Starbucks, izakayas (Japanese pubs), Pachinko parlors, and even cat cafes. Oldenburg does not include religious spaces among his list of examples. As I will show in this paper, however, while shrines and pubs are seemingly quite different, they in fact share many of the same characteristics of third place that make each of them valuable in public life. In many ways, Hanazono Shrine is in fact more inclusive and accessible and hosts a wider variety of people and public activities than many of the examples of third places that Oldenburg sets out. It is important to note that the religious climate of Japan is quite different from that of the United States; the differences in attitudes towards religion and accordingly toward religious spaces might be one reason that Oldenburg, who drew his examples of third places from America and Europe, did not include any religious spaces among his examples. In recent surveys on " 5" religiosity in Japan, only around 30% of respondents affirmed religious beliefs while 65% denied having religious beliefs (Reader 6). While religious belief in Japan is low, self-reported religious belonging and participation in religious activities is high (Reader 6, 10). The tendency in Western religious studies to focus on doctrine, theologies, and beliefs has led some scholars to classify Japanese traditions as non-religious; however, in this paper I refer to “religion” as a term that includes “ritual, practice, and custom,” and is “readily intermingled with cultural and social themes in which belief and doctrine can play a part but are not essential” (Reader and Tanabe 4- 5).1 As this paper deals with religious space within the context of Japan, it is important to note that a Western lens on religion and religious spaces falls short; the distinct Japanese religious context within which Hanazono Shrine is situated shapes who visits the shrine and how they interact with the space. It is also because of this religious context that I find the concept of third place to be applicable to Shinto spaces in Japan, though it may not apply in the same ways to religious places in other cultural contexts. I have grounded my research in a number of books on Shinto and Japanese religion in society. Of the many books about Japanese religion that I consulted, three in particular have been central to my understanding of the symbolic significances of Hanazono Shrine: Ian Reader and George Tanabe’s Practically Religious: Worldly Benefits and the Common Religion of Japan (1998) explains how Japanese religions provide benefits to people in their human lives. Karen Ann Smyers’ The Fox and the Jewel: Shared and Private Meanings in Contemporary Japanese Inari Worship (1999) describes the evolution and polysemy of the Inari deity, one of the most famous of the Shinto deities and one of the deities enshrined at Hanazono Shrine.