David Chart

Last year, Tokyo Jinjachō made two videos demonstrating the etiquette for visiting a jinja and put them online. They are both less than three minutes long, and were filmed at jinja in Tokyo. The first is about how to purify yourself, both when there is a ladle, and when there isn’t. The second is about the etiquette of paying your respects, both with and without a bell rope. The Japanese subtitles on both videos mainly give descriptions of what is being done, rather than additional explanation, with an encouragement to… Read More »Jinja Etiquette Videos

Bloomsbury Shinto Studies is a series of books, in English, about Shinto, published by Bloomsbury (and thus probably subsidised by the profits from Harry Potter). The series is still active, and although the initial hardcover publications are very expensive, the paperback versions are more reasonable. You can also get ebooks direct from Bloomsbury, although I am sure that they are available on Amazon as well. These are serious academic books, and thus rather heavier going than most of the things I write for Mimusubi, but they are all interesting, and… Read More »Bloomsbury Shinto Studies

This blog post covers two articles about sacred forests from Jinja Shinpō, because these two drifted a bit from the core topic in talking about the history and etymology of sacred forests. The article in the January 31st issue was mainly about sacred forests in other cultures; they were found in ancient Egypt, and in India, and in China from the fifth or sixth century. It did talk briefly about Japan. There are remains of structures from the mid-Yayoi period onwards (from around 100 BCE) that appear to be ritual… Read More »Origins and Etymology of Sacred Forests

My book, An Introduction to Shinto, is now available in print from Amazon (affiliate link!). It is available from all the local Amazons, although the affiliate link is to the US store, because that is where most of my sales happen. The content is the same as the Kindle version, except that I have added QR Codes for the links, and the paperback is printed in black and white, so the illustrations and photographs are also in black and white. This is not ideal, especially for the illustrations of priestly… Read More »An Introduction to Shinto in Paperback

This is a short post. I have posted about the Encyclopedia of Shinto at Kokugakuin University before, but that was a while ago, and one of my patrons sent me a message revealing that he didn’t know about it. This is a freely-accessible English translation of the standard Japanese Encyclopedia of Shinto. I think it is very reliable; I use the Japanese version when I want to check particular facts, and the translation was done by most of the English-speaking scholars of Shinto who were active at the time. It… Read More »Encyclopedia of Shinto