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A shrine merger is the merger of one or several Shinto shrines with another shrine. Such mergers were especially promoted by the Home Ministry, based on the legal foundation of two Imperial edicts proclaimed in 1906. This paper is based on the Jinja-meisai-cho pertaining to five old villages located in the southern suburbs of Komatsu City. The Jinja-meisai-cho were the official Shinto shrine registers authorized by the Meiji government after 1872, submitted to the Home Ministry by every prefecture, with the prefectures keeping a duplicate. Information about shrine mergers was normally added in red ink in each Jinja-meisai-cho. The author applied to publicize the Jinja-meisai-cho of the above five villages, which are kept by the Ishikawa Prefectural Office, and acquired copies of them. The paper begins by examining how we should interpret information about the integration and abolition of the individual Shinto shrines contained in Ishikawa Prefectural Office’s Jinja-meisai-cho, which were compiled in various formats. It outlines the following different types of shrine mergers: the merger of an abolished shrine with another shrine, and transfer to the precincts of another shrine to establish a new shrine (Keidai-sha). Among the preceding studies of shrine mergers, WATANABE Kei-ichi’s paper of 2009 was the first to point out the importance of the latter type. Finally, the paper compares the Jinja-meisai-cho of the five Ishikawa villages with those of Kamisato Town, Saitama Prefecture, the topic of Watanabe’s case study, and it clarifies the characteristics of the shrine mergers in the southern suburbs of Komatsu City. |
