Buddhist priests head to cities to top up income

Most weekends between mid-July and mid-August, Tesshu Tamura, the chief priest of a Buddhist temple in northern Saitama Prefecture, packed his scriptures and priest's outfit into a suitcase, jumped into his car and set out for Tokyo.

There, the 32-year-old spent his days visiting family homes and cemeteries, and resting at business hotels, all the while accumulating a tidy income to supplement the earnings from his regular job.

Tamura is one of nearly 200 "dispatch priests" registered with Grand Religion Co., a firm based in Warabi, Saitama Prefecture, that caters to the growing community of urbanites who no longer have ties to a family temple.

Full story at Asahi Shimbun.

In Japan, as far as I was able to tell, a priest will actually 'own' his local temple building (usually with a house attached where his family lives). However, with the migration of people to the cities, the rural temples must be making meagre earnings (along with the growing distance of the youth from religious matters).

Yes, I posted an article on this last year. The rural temples are struggling because there aren't enough villagers to support them, there is competition from companies offering burial services, and the son who should take over the the temple has gone to live in the big city.