David Chart

Ashizu Uzuhiko is almost certainly the most important twentieth-century Shinto thinker. His influence on Jinja Honchō, and thus on the framework within which the overwhelming majority of Shinto jinja operate, was profound. I have written about him before, but Jinja Shinpō has just run a series of three articles (in the September 4th, 11th, and 18th issues) about his view on the separation of state and religion, so I am writing about him again. The author of the articles, Prof. Fujita, is at Kokugakuin University, but in the Health and… Read More »Ashizu Uzuhiko on State and Religion

The Shin Mei Spiritual Centre is a Shinto and Buddhist centre in Canada, on an island close to Vancouver Island, in the Pacific Northwest. It is now the North American branch shrine of Tsubaki Ōkami Yashiro, having taken over from the site in Washington State when Revd Barrish retired. It is run by Revd Ann Evans, who was trained at Tsubaki Ōkami Yashiro, and has published an English translation of Shinto norito. (That’s an affiliate link.) I haven’t visited this centre yet, but Revd Evans recently contacted me about selling… Read More »Shin Mei Spiritual Centre

Jinja Honchō has recently convened a committee to look into how it is funded, and how it spends the money. It has been about fifteen years since this was last done, and the immediate trigger was a change in the availability of statistics: one of the measures that Jinja Honchō used to ensure that its demands for payments were fairly distributed across Japan has not been updated since 2015. (I don’t know why it took them eight years to look for a replacement. I assume that the change looked temporary,… Read More »Jinja Honchō Finances

The September 4th issue of Jinja Shinpō carried an article about the revival, after 150 years, of a matsuri at Hirota Jinja, in Hyōgo Prefecture. The matsuri in question is centred on the public display of a jewel: a crystal with a flaw in it that looks like a sword. According to the jinja’s account, this crystal is the “wish-fulfilling jewel” that Okinagatarashihimë (also known as Jingū Kōgō) is said, in the Nihonshoki, to have found before travelling to conquer the Korean peninsula. As Okinagatarashihimë is also said to have… Read More »Sword Jewel Matsuri

Baseball is very important in Japanese culture. It was first developed in the Kofun Period, and… No, OK, it was imported from the USA in the nineteenth century. But it’s still really important. The baseball results are the ones reported on the national news every morning, and the national high school baseball championships in spring and summer (known as Kōshien, after the stadium in which they are held) are shown live on television. (This year’s summer victors had their second victory, after a 107 year wait.) It does not have… Read More »Baseball