David Chart

The March 7th issue of Jinja Shinpō had another article in the series on sacred forests, and this one returned to the core topic, looking at the question of how they should be maintained. It was written by a lecturer at Tokyo Agricultural University, who presumably knows what he is talking about. It starts by observing that the image of sacred forests is of trees, certainly, but also other plants, and a wide variety of animals, living in an area that people neither enter nor interfere with. On the other… Read More »The Preservation and Maintenance of Sacred Forests

I’ve got a bit behind with interesting articles from Jinja Shinpō, so the one I want to mention today is from February 28th. It is another article about the problems with transaction charges for depositing coins in banks. As I have mentioned before, some jinja looked into cooperating with local shops, who had problems with the transaction charges for withdrawing coins, and this article was about some specific examples. It was written by someone who works for Osaka Jinjachō, so both of the jinja mentioned are in Osaka Prefecture. The… Read More »Coins, Again

Today’s video is brought to you, indirectly, by the YouTube algorithm. It is longer than the ones I normally introduce, and was put online about two years ago by Togakushi Jinja. Togakushi Jinja is, I think, the most important jinja about which I know nothing. Obviously, I am exaggerating slightly. I know that it was an extremely important centre for shugendō, the heavily Buddhism-influenced form of Shinto in which mountains played a crucial role. (Some people might describe shugendō as a Shinto-influenced form of Buddhism, and I can’t say that… Read More »Togakushi Jinja

The 21st February issue of Jinja Shinpō contained an article in the series about sacred forests. However, it did not have much to do with sacred forests, at least not directly — it was about the place of mountains in traditional Shinto belief. (It is true that most of those mountains have forests on them.) The article took a particular matsuri, a “mountain praising” matsuri, as its starting point. This matsuri is held at Shikaumi Jinja, or “Shika Sea Jinja”, which is on Shika-no-Shima, an island just off the coast… Read More »Venerating Mountains

Toyama Prefectural Jinjachō created a short TV advert last year to encourage people to get Jingū Taima, and it was shown a couple of dozen times on television within Toyama prefecture. It’s only fifteen seconds long. Jingū Taima are the ofuda from the Naiku at Jingū, in Isë, which enshrines Amaterasu Ōmikami. The Shinto establishment believes that every household in Japan should have one, and has been running campaigns to achieve that constantly for as long as I have been involved in Shinto, and for some time before. Alas for… Read More »Jingū Taima Video

I have just finished reading Shinto: A History by Helen Hardacre. (Affiliate link) It is the best history of Shinto available in English at the moment, and while that is not exactly a crowded field, it is head-and-shoulders above the competition. I would expect this to remain the standard one-volume history of Shinto in English for a good few years yet, because there would need to be significant changes in the general view of the topic to make it worth anyone’s while to produce a competing volume. I certainly don’t… Read More »A Review of Shinto: A History