Kyoto Peace

God and Mammon have long been partners in Kyoto, whose centuries-old Buddhist and Shinto temples are a potent magnet for worshipers and sightseers from all over the world, but changing times have exacted a telling strain on the partnership. When they were cut off from government subsidy by the MacArthur constitution, which divorced Japanese church and state, most of Kyoto's temples began charging admission fees in order to support themselves. The result was a bonanza of tax-free riches. This delighted the Buddhist and Shinto priests but filled Kyoto's Mayor Gizo Takayama, a Congregationalist, with ill-concealed envy. To Mayor Takayama, whose father founded the first Y.M.C.A. in the city, the sightseers' gold was an asset that should be shared by the temples with the city as a whole. To help pay off his city's deficit (1,800,000,000 yen) and to construct a vast urban convention hall, the mayor proposed a 5-to 10-yen tax on each temple admission fee.

Kyoto's priests cried out in dismay. "Whoever heard of a man having to pay a tax to worship his God?" they protested in handbills and newspaper ads. By way of answer, city hall pointed gleefully to at least one priest who had absconded with some 9,000,000 yen contributed by visitors at his temple, spent 2.000,000 of it on geisha girls and cabarets and the rest on a sloe-eyed model whom he set up as mistress of her own bar. Admitting that "perhaps some priests have become a bit too worldly," the abbot of Zen Daitokuji Temple insisted nevertheless that one bad priest should not be used to damn the entire clergy. The priests found an unexpected ally in Kyoto's Communists who. bitterly opposing the mayor on any count, promptly joined the fray with a sound truck that blared out the charge that Takayama was "persecuting religion." With their most pious mien, the priests thereupon barred the doors of their temples to all but "genuine worshipers," whom they admitted free. The definition of a "genuine worshiper"? One who agreed to make a "voluntary" (and hence taxfree) donation later.

Last week, with the situation thus stalemated, bustling, rotund Ichiro Kono, whose official title as Minister of Agriculture and Forestry serves to disguise the fact that he is one'of the brainiest men in the Hatoyama government, invited priests and mayor alike to Tokyo to talk the whole thing over. "With 8,000,000 tourists coming to Kyoto yearly," he pointed out, "nobody's coffers need be empty." Let the temples charge their admission, he suggested; let the city collect its tax. Then let the temples put in for heavy tax deductions against the national government on the expenses in their maintenance. "On those terms," said Chief Priest Nisaki, crushing out an aromatic cigarette among the minister's teacups, "we will cooperate with the mayor." The temples reopened this week to all comers.

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