David Chart

One of my readers asked me about the general Shinto attitude to LGBTQ presence at jinja and participation in matsuri. As I have mentioned before, this is not a hot-button issue in Japan, although the Shinto world tends to the conservative side of things. That meant that I did not immediately know what the answer would be, so I asked a few priests I know. I contacted priests who are in a position to know what the general attitude is, rather than just at their jinja, but there are a… Read More »LGBTQ at Jinja

The YouTube video linked below is an interview with a Ukrainian Shinto priestess, called Tatiana. The video is all in Japanese, and while I looked at the autotranslate English subtitles, they are terrible. Nevertheless, they are, in most cases, better than nothing, if you assume that the really weird bits are translation problems. (Their conversation is entirely reasonable.) Tatiana is a priestess, and licensed by Jinja Honchō. (I happen to know, independently, that this is true.) She may well be the first non-Japanese woman to be licensed as a Shinto… Read More »A Ukrainian Priestess

Over the past few years, Jinja Shinpō has carried quite a few articles by the head of Fukushima Prefectural Jinjachō, mostly about the recovery efforts after the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011. Fukushima Prefecture was particularly affected by this, because it was the site of the nuclear plant that suffered several meltdowns. It is important to remember that Fukushima is not the prefecture that suffered the most casualties, but because radiation levels made it impossible to remain in part of the prefecture for more than a few hours every… Read More »Transferring Kami in Fukushima

I have just released two more of my past Patreon essays for sale on Amazon, as The Early History of Shinto. These two essays cover the archaeology of Shinto in the Kofun period of Japanese history, roughly 300 CE to 650 CE, and the early records of matsuri, Shinto rituals, as preserved mainly in the early eighth century. The origin of Shinto is a very interesting topic, because it is very controversial. Some people say that Shinto goes back to the Jōmon culture of the Japanese archipelago, back to 10,000… Read More »New Book: The Early History of Shinto

After the Meiji Revolution, in 1868, the government shut down the priests of Jingū who had distributed ofuda and organised the veneration of Amaterasu Ōmikami at Isë by people from across Japan. Without those priests, they needed a new way to link everyone to Jingū, and so, in 1872, a governmental system was set up to distribute the ofuda to every household. This changed several times, and its links to the state were, of course, abolished after WWII. However, Jinja Honchō regards their distribution of Jingū Taima as continuing this… Read More »Publicising Shinto

The July 26th issue of Jinja Shinpō carried a column with the same title as this blog post, written by the chief priest of a jinja in Shikoku. (This is the woman who served as one of the Tennō’s priestesses, and who did not come from a jinja family.) This is interesting in itself, because Jinja Shinpō almost never addresses this kind of issue. I suspect that this was published because, as a personal column, this article is clearly not an official statement from Jinja Shinpōsha (the publishers of Jinja… Read More »“What are Kami?”