A couple of weeks ago I was preparing something for Jinja Honchō, and needed to check Kokugakuin’s English Shinto website. That reminded me that I hadn’t written about it here, so I am making up for that now.
Kokugakuin University is the larger of the two Shinto universities in Japan, and trains more Shinto priests than any other institution. It does a lot of research on Shinto, and publishes some of that research in English. It also has a museum, which has a section on Shinto that is worth a visit if you are in Tokyo.
Unfortunately, not all of the links on the portal page still work, including the most important one on the site, the link to the English version of the Encyclopedia of Shinto. Fortunately, I can fix that.
This is a translation of a Japanese encyclopedia, which I own, so I don’t use the English version. However, it is great for looking up specific points. It has the normal problems of an encyclopedia, in that it is too brief and glosses over a lot of detail, but the information it has is reliable, and it covers a wide range. It is a very good place to check something you found on the internet.
Thank you! I was trying to find this earlier and couldn’t find a way around the broken link.