New Book: Shinto in Person: Tokyo

My new book on Shinto, Shinto in Person: Tokyo, is now available for purchase on Amazon and Gumroad. There will be a print version available on Amazon very soon (possibly by the time you read this), but the approval process for hardcopy takes a bit longer than that for Kindle books.

As the blurb says, the book is for someone who wants to visit jinja in Tokyo and learn about Shinto as they go. It does talk about the individual jinja, but it is more about broader Shinto culture, and how each jinja fits into that. There is very little (although not quite nothing) about the architecture of the jinja, because someone who is at the jinja can see what that looks like, and there is more important background to explain. As a result, I think the book should be interesting to someone who is not visiting the jinja as well, although you would probably want to search online for photographs.

As the structure of the title might suggest, I do have plans to make this into a series. I would like to entice people to visit parts of Japan, and jinja, off the normal tourist trail, although I doubt that I will make any noticeable impact on visitor patterns. I’ve already started work on the second book, but the level of sales may influence whether there is a third. We’ll see.