“Tales of Sacred Forests”

Over the past few years, Jinja Honchō has produced a number of short (under five minute) videos introducing “ordinary” jinja around Japan, under the title “Chinju no Mori no Monogatari”, or “Tales of Sacred Forests”. They are more about the jinja and the matsuri than the forests as such, but “mori” is Japanese for the sacred space of a kami as well as for a woodland, so that is fair. They were made with a Japanese satellite television company, and broadcast in Japan.

Jinja Honchō is now making them available on their YouTube channel. (As of this writing, it has 31 subscribers. They probably all work at Jinja Honchō.) As part of this, they have asked me to provide subtitles for the videos, and the first of the subtitled videos went up a week ago.

I should just like to emphasise that, while I was responsible for the subtitles, I was not responsible for the English text in the description. I think you can edit the descriptive text of a video after publication, so I will have a word with them about this. (2022/10/08) They have revised the description and fixed the error in the title that was pointed out in the comments. There’s still a misplaced quotation mark in the description right now, but I’ll see about getting that fixed as well. The plan is for them to use the same text on all the videos, just replacing the name and location of the jinja.

Anyway, the Japanese, no-subtitles, version has fewer than 60 views as I write this, so let’s see whether we can get the view numbers higher on the English versions. Comments are turned off on the video, but they are still turned on for this blog post.

There will be more of these (I’ve already done some more subtitles), and I will post links when they appear.