Update: ShintoUpsurge? Let's Hope Richard Halloran Is Not a False Witness

Visitors to major Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples in 2007 during the Three New Year Days reached what appears to be an all-time high of 93.73 million. Attendance dipping below 80 million with the best of weather at the peak of the bubble economy years, the faithful are returning to the flock (at least for Oshogatsu) to the consternation of irreligious and/or proselytizing Japan-watchers around the world.

Of course there is always the possibility that the National Police, who are responsible for these statistics, are lying to us. And, as in the case of global warming, a sudden winter chill, sleet or rain, if not gloom of night, in 2008 could easily give fleeting heart to naysayers of the Great Awakening that Richard Halloran gives witness to.

Richard Halloran Holds Forth on Shinto Resurgence, Contrasts Yasukuni and Meiji Shrines

Veteran Japan hand Richard Halloran blew into town, did some walking around, came up with something that goes little noticed even here in Japan, and wrote it up in Real Clear Politics.

Maybe I've been too lazy to notice, maybe it's another case of it takes a gaijin, but Mr. Halloran's story of a resurgent Shinto makes sense. After all, there's solid evidence of a spiritual malaise begging to be taken care of, from soaring suicides rates to spiritual nostrum peddlers commanding center stage in the mainstream media (yes, I'm talking about the Sopranos-meets-Sylvia-Brown Kazuko Hosogi and the John-Edward-cum-Deepak-Chopra Hiroyuki Ehara*) to the more general dissatisfaction that seems to grip the Japanese mind whenever we are asked to answer opinion polls. We tend to blame the aftereffects of the bubble years. We are unsatisfied with the present, and worried about the future; where else are we to go?

A lesser hand might try to weave it into the surging right, military might, trope that earns space in the English-language mainstream media. Mr. Halloran instead focuses on the Meiji Shrine, and juxtaposes it with the Yasukuni, which has, fairly or unfairly, come to be solely identified in the ELMSM with the dark side of our post-Meiji Restoration history. Indeed, the two shrines surely provide the leitmotifs that weave through Prime Minister Abe's historical narrative, much in the way the pre-1945 and post-1945 biographies of his grandfather Nobusuke Kishi illuminate his personal animus (in the Jungian sense, so the dictionary tells me).

*I suppose I should be happy our low-key, ecumenical, quasi-animistic approach to the supernatural precludes the proliferation of televangelist knock-offs. Then again, some might argue that we have the Tokugawa Shogunate to thank (or curse, depending on your point of view) for being spared the worst effects of a dominant, proselytizing creed.