Natacha Aveline, paper for the AAS annual conference, April 6-9, 2006, San Francisco. 
Panel n° 112, “Conflicts in the economy of sacred space in China and Japan”

Changes in sacred space under the pressure of land markets in central Tokyo

	While buddhism and shintô are commonly thought as separated worlds in nowadays Japan, specialists of japanese religions, at the opposite, have a tendency to insist that buddhism and shintô used to be not so distinguished, and in reality are not so different, at least when it comes to religious practices. I think that it is very original and stimulating in this context to consider shintô and buddhism from a “non-religious” point of view, as Natacha did : how do these religious institutions resist, or react, to new circumstances, characterized by a dramatic decrease of their parishioners and the land pressure. How do these institutions use their land property ? How do their specific link with the land modify their ability to react to nowaday’s demands, when inflating land prices going together with massive urban renewal projects in central Tokyo transform  religious properties as a target for land redevelopment schemes?
	
I.
Responsible for cemeteries, funerals services and post-mortem rites, with their nearly complete “monopoly of death”, Buddhist monks have more chance to be involved in profitables activities. Natacha list up several ways to profit the very high prices of burial sites: 
1/ to  send the religious knowledge and religious organization status – which allow them, under the law, to treat death - , to private operators who will develop cemeteries in large parcel out of the center of the big cities
2/ to develop new burial sites in the limited surface of the temple by regaining land from abandoned graves. 
3/ to convert, partly or totally, a cemetery into a columbarium, a “locker-like tombs”
(I really do not understand why this solution have not gained so much popularity). 
4/ to increase the supply of burial sites by converting the use of green areas of the Buddhist temples (bamboo forests for example). 
	
	Whatever the strategy may be, it turns to a profitable business in the short and medium term, since a tomb signifies a regular revenue based on the post-mortem rites.
But everything is not so easy and buddhist institutions also have to face problems in their desire to promote their land : 
1/ Death is an alarming thing. Nobody likes to be in the middle of tombs, except perhaps when the cherry trees blossom. The buddhist institution must consequently reorganize its space to dissimulate from the public eyes his principal source of income. 
2/ To do so, the Buddhist chief monk has to negotiate with each owner of a grave. But you told us that although this procedure is quite burdensome, owners of burial sites are generally flexible upon the transfer, for all kind of even financial reasons. 

II. 
Contrary to the Buddhists, Shinto communities have not been traditionally involved into death matters. And even don’t speak so much about it. You told us that, established as a « State religion » which could be compared to others “world level religions”, Shinto started to deal with funerals after 1868, but that shinto priests have not expanded activities beyond funerals, such as development of cemeteries nearby shrines. This could have change after the war when the new constitution conduces to the abolition of the State Shinto, and the financial support of the state, and push Shinto officers to find ways to survive. At the same time, religious institutions had recovered in 1947 their rights over land, and the freedom to use their land holdings. Nevertheless the diversification of Shinto shrines towards “non-religious businesses” was not exceptional in the three decades following the war, and really begin when the “land bubble” took place.
You evoked several means of, what you called, extra-religious diversification:
1/ The construction of rental parking lots and retail facilities
2/ The rebuilt and incorporation of the shrines into low-rise constructions with shopping malls. 
3/ They could be either redeveloped into middle-rise multistory, or be included into more large-scale redevelopment projects. In the latter case, the original boundaries of the religious space would disappear.

Difficulties
Natacha pointed out at least 3 main difficulties that the shrines have to face.
1/ The need to separate sacred and non sacred spaces: this separation is not only a limit but have to be a empty space, at least surrounding the main building.

2/ The obligation for the shrine to be in contact with the land in some way: when land pressure was not that big, the honden was relocated on the groundfloor, but as religious specialists are very good to build rules, and at the very same times to elaborate ways to circumvent the rules, the higher have been the price the weaker have become the link between the real land and the building. Ishii, in a very interesting paper about Ginza and its shrines, explained that more than 40 of them have been rebuild on the high store building roof, without so much problem. ... Anyway we can remember that land is a good containing the main object of business for the shinto institution, which is a kind of complication buddhits don’t have to cope with. 

3/ It seems that there are also rules concerning architecture, the shape of the building, you told us that the crossbeams (chigi) must projects outwards from a roof-ends proper, and I’m sure that there are also other cases depending on the characteristics of every specific case. 

All these restrictions explain why you found so little constructions of buildings and parking facilities in the shrine by contrast to Buddhist temples.

III.
To be such in a situation that it becomes necessary to find new assets is certainly not new for the religious institutions in Japan. For example just before the modern times, when the man of power of the moment, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, was looking for affirming his power more firmly, you had what historians call the reduction of religious properties of the Bunroku era (bunroku no sharyô bosshû), en 1591. That induced huge changes in the shrine organization, even spatial organization, as one could check looking at the history of one of the most important shrine of Japan, the Great Shrine of Izumo for example. Having lost half of its land properties, on which its was leaving, Izumo shrine and priests had to find another way to collect money, and they invented, copied and refit, the pilgrimage fashion. Their aim was to invite people from different regions of « Japan », and no longer only the local parishioners, to spend money in their hotels, for the visit, and to order rituals. In this process, the shrine had to change drastically, to reshape its spatial and social space to build some infrastructures : buildings but also clerks specialized in managing the pilgrims (oshi). This has a connection with Shin-Yi paper so I might say a little bit more about it later.
	Nowadays, the power is, in a way, no longer political, but rather economical. Religious establishments have nevertheless to cope with pretty the same problems : the pressure of the power in their land properties. I don’t know yet what kind of religious reshapes it will induce. I’m not really sure that the very knew changes one can observe in the shrines management will be more than episodical (I am thinking here of attempts to disconnect shrines from their spatial inscription, with on-line o-mairi). What we have seen here are the limits restricting a free use of the religious or sacred space. And what we saw is that these limits seems more strict in the shinto world that in the buddhist’s. It could sound paradoxical: the buddhist sacred place is certainly more structured, more precisely defined, than the shinto’s enclosure. While land operators need empty spaces, more than old buddhist graveyards, it appears that shrine empty space is not ready to be used. But I think that the following paper from Fabienne will allow us to be a little more precise on this theme, so I will stop here and give her the place.