Skip to content

Okuni Jinja

The most recent bit of my work for Jinja Honchō to become public is on the English website of Okuni Jinja, in Shizuoka Prefecture.

https://www.shinto-okunijinja-japan.net

On this project, I was translating and providing English texts for large portions of the site, but I was not closely involved with the process of getting it set up — which is why they have a page entitled “What are Shinto?”, although the filename is “what-is-shinto”. The page about kami has the opposite problem. (The text on these pages is also taken from Jinja Honchō publications from before my time. It uses phrasings that we avoid today. It is not easy to explain Shinto in English briefly and without inviting misunderstandings, so we are continually refining our approach.)

This is quite a large homepage, with a lot of English on it, and I invite you to have a look around. I am hoping to include this jinja in a follow-up to Shinto in Person: Tokyo (Amazon and Gumroad) — to be called Shinto in Person: Shizuoka — because it is a very old and important jinja, but it is not the easiest place to get to by public transport. I will get there to do research, but it may be a bit too much trouble for visitors.

We often do not use macrons on jinja websites, because they can be a bit off-putting to people who are not familiar with them. However, in this case we really had to, because the jinja is Okuni Jinja, but the main kami is Ōkuninushi-no-mikoto. We couldn’t have them looking the same…

English websites are one of the things I am often asked to do, but this was definitely on the larger side. I hope that people find it useful.

I have a Patreon, where people join as paid members to receive an in-depth essay on some aspect of Shinto every month, or as free members to receive notifications of updates to this blog. If that sounds interesting to you, please take a look.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.