David Chart

The December 6th issue of Jinja Shinpō had a short article about a matsuri held at a jinja in Yamagata Prefecture, Shōnai Jinja. The matsuri involves a procession, which was held this year, at reduced scale, after being cancelled last year. However, from this year the date of the matsuri has been changed from August 15th to October 6th, because of “extreme heat caused by climate change”, to quote the article. This is the first example of such a change that I have seen, but I doubt it will be… Read More »Matsuri Timing

Imaizumi Tenmangū, in Iwatë Prefecture, was one of the many jinja devastated by the tsunami in March 2011. The jinja buildings were all washed away, leaving only the sacred tree, or shinboku, a great sugi (cedar). Unfortunately, the tree was poisoned by the salt in the seawater, and began dying, so that it had to be cut down. The trunk was left standing to the height reached by the tsunami, 4.5 m from the ground. The November 29th issue of Jinja Shinpō had an article about the next stage of… Read More »Trees and Mirrors

As regular readers of this blog probably know, Shichigosan is a very popular autumn ceremony in which three, five, and seven-year-old children visit a jinja (or sometimes a Buddhist temple) dressed in very fancy (rented) kimono, and offer, with their families, a prayer of thanks for their healthy growth so far, and a request for continued protection. Like all events that involve going somewhere in a group, this has been disrupted by the pandemic, and the November 29th issue of Jinja Shinpō had a front-page article about this year’s situation.… Read More »The State of Shichigosan

“Kagura” is the term within Shinto for sacred dance and music, and these days it normally brings to mind either miko dancing during a jinja ceremony, or masked dances telling stories from Shinto myth. However, the term is far broader than that, and those are not the oldest forms. Recently, I read a book by Revd Kanzaki Noritakë (神崎宣武), Priest and Village Folklore (神主と村の民俗誌). This book was originally published in the early nineties, although I read the 2019 reissue from Kodansha. Revd Kanzaki is still active, and writes a regular… Read More »Oracular Kagura

An English-language book about Shinto, Yasukuni Fundamentalism (affiliate link) by Mark R. Mullins was published earlier this year. It is an interesting book about some of the political activities of people connected with Shinto, and I wrote a full review of it as part of my Patreon. It is well-researched. It covers a wide range of topics, and, in the areas that I already know about, the facts reported in the book are almost all true, with a small number of trivial inaccuracies. Since Mullins does not make any important… Read More »Yasukuni Fundamentalism

In the November 22nd issue, Jinja Shinpō began an occasional series of articles on the sacred forests (鎮守の森, chinju no mori) of jinja. I have mentioned before that all jinja aspire to have a sacred forest, even if practicalities sometimes restrict it to a single tree, and the first article in the series, by Revd Sonoda Minoru, tackles the history of that reality. Revd Sonoda is a very important figure in this area of Shinto. He is the chief priest of Chichibu Jinja in Saitama Prefecture, and has written extensively… Read More »The Sacredness of Forests