In recent years, the study of Shinto神道priests on the local level has progressed under the historical concept of "social status periphery".Using this concept, historians of the Tokugawa Period have shown a relative instability in the status of Shinto priests in conparison to Buddhist monks, who played the predominate religios role during the period.In an attempt to further clarify such a line of argument, the present paper looks into the organization of Shinto priests in the province of Aki, a region overwhelmingly dominated by the Buddhist Shin Pure Land Sect.For Shinto priests on the social status periphery, one way of escaping such social instability was to organize under the patroage of such influential families as the Yoshidas吉田 and thus ensure their social position.However, intervention by the Yoshida family in the affairs of local Shinto priests was by no means always welcome.On the occasion of the dispatch of agents to adron the shrines of Hiroshima Feud with heihaku幣帛 symbols of worship, the Yoshida family took the opportunity to install purification deputies(注連没頭)in each district for the purpose of registering local Shinto priests.However, such a policy was ineffective due to a lack of organization among the priests in the region.A similar opportunity was presented in 1804 for the Yoshida family to intervene, designed to influence the region for a long time to come.This took advantage of the holding of ceremonies, called kokuonsai国恩祭, for the first time in Hiroshima Feud.They were events that gathered the Shinto priests of each locality together to play for the health and safty of the feudal lordout of gratitude for his benevolence.Such gatherings helped nurture a sense of solodarity and organization among local priests and thus enabled the Yoshida family's intervention of the early 1880s to have a more lasting effect on the region than in the 1740s.The paper concludes that the act of Shinto ritually repaying the feud for its kindness clearly a conscious attempt they were suffering.
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