The fledgeling union, comprising a handful of monks and other workers from the famous Zenkoji temple in Nagano, sends a chilling message to priests across the country. They may all eventually be forced to view their shaven-headed flock as employees, rather than as devotees.

Created with a view to collective bargaining for pay rises and better employment conditions, the Zenkoji Daikanjin Bunkai is a milestone in Japanese labour relations. Trade union leaders believe that the Nagano monk’s display of shop-floor activism will spread, quickly, because disputes between monks and more senior religious leaders are far from uncommon.

Like many other workers’ movements, the unionising of the Zenkoji temple exploded out of a single instance of perceived management abuse.

A 52-year-old monk who belonged to Zenkoji found himself in the middle of a power struggle between the main temple authorities — the Daikanjin — and those of the associated temples under its wing — the Tatchu. The monk, a follower of the Tendai sect of Buddhism, made the mistake of criticising one of the high priests and was punished as a Japanese office worker might be. He was separated from his co-workers and ordered to perform a meaningless task: copying out Buddhist sutras in a tiny room for two months.

His fellow monks were enraged, and a lawsuit was filed on his behalf in which the temple was accused of treating him in a way that fell outside his “contract”. The monk approached his local Nagano branch of Zenroren, the National Confederation of Trade Unions, which studied the contract under which he was working and decided that there were grounds to form a union.

Toshio Sugata, the chairman of the Nagano Zenroren, said: “This is the first time that monks have been unionised. We learnt that they were employed by Daikanjin, the main temple of the Tendai sect, under labour regulations in which their payment and working hours were formally laid out. In that sense, monks have the same employment status as salarymen.”

Mr Sugata said that one of his colleagues in a sister branch of the confederation had received an inquiry from junior monks undergoing their notoriously ascetic training about whether they had the same payroll rights as general workers.

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