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David Chart

Starting to Serve

Revd Tagawa’s series of columns in Jinja Shinpō continued in the December 16th issue. This instalment covers the beginning of her service as a priest. As she mentioned in the previous column, she had found a place at Imari Jinja, fairly near her home, and she was soon given responsibility for gokitō (formal prayers). This was not just in the jinja itself, but also in their wedding hall. There, she had a problem. The miko were older than her, and their reaction was to laugh. “What? A female priest?” Now,… Read More »Starting to Serve

Mutual Aid for Priests

Tottori Prefecture, on the Japan Sea coast, has the lowest population of any prefecture in Japan — 530,000, or about a third the population of Kawasaki. This means that it has all the problems of depopulation, including the ones that directly affect jinja. The December 2nd issue of Jinja Shinpō had an article about part of the response. The prefectural association of young priests has set up a group that links jinja looking for extra priests for special matsuri with young priests who want to get more experience of serving… Read More »Mutual Aid for Priests

A Jinja in Thailand

The December 16th issue of Jinja Shinpō had an article about an overseas jinja and, coincidentally, it was founded from Okuni Jinja. The jinja is in J-Park Sriracha, and given that the katakana transcription of “Sriracha” was “Shiracha”, I am not going to transcribe any of the other Thai names from the article, because I would almost certainly get them horribly wrong. J-Park was built to cater to local Japanese expatriates (I get the impression that Japanese car companies have a significant number of factories in the area), and to… Read More »A Jinja in Thailand

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. [Edit 2025/01/08: The people who are closely involved in getting… Read More »Okuni Jinja

Trees for Christmas

At the end of last week I visited my local jinja, Shirahata Hachiman Daijin, and the autumn leaves were looking very good. The trees and other plants in the precincts at this jinja have been carefully planned so that there is something worth seeing at almost any time of the year. Unfortunately, the gingko had to be pruned a few years ago, and the leaves are only just recovering. This year, they did turn quite yellow, so maybe they will be back to being photo-worthy soon. I do not post… Read More »Trees for Christmas

Hatsumōdë Video

Jinja Honchō has created a couple of advertising videos to encourage people to go to Hatsumōdë, visiting a jinja at the new year. There are 15 and 30 second edits, but I will just link to the longer one, because it does appear to include the whole of the shorter one. It may not be obvious what all the images are, so here are some explanations. 00: Sunrise. Or maybe sunset played backwards, but it is representing sunrise. This is probably because the first sunrise of the new year is… Read More »Hatsumōdë Video