David Chart

Shinto is often seen as a nature-worshipping religion, and this perception has quite a bit of truth to it. After all, jinja are all supposed to have sacred forests, and some natural features are revered as kami. However, this does not mean that Shinto has traditionally been environmentally conscious in the modern sense. Aike Rots has written a very interesting book about the growth of the idea of Shinto as an environmental religion, Shinto, Nature and Ideology in Contemporary Japan: Making Sacred Forests (affiliate link!), and it is certainly true… Read More »Shinto and the Environment

The August 23rd issue of Jinja Shinpō had a short article about prayers for Olympic success at Fujisan Hongū Sengen Taisha. This is the main Sengen Jinja, where Mount Fuji is the goshintai. The jinja has a subsidiary sanctuary on top of Mount Fuji, and actually owns the upper part of the mountain. (A good example of property where the symbolic value greatly outweighs the monetary value.) The article reported on Olympic athletes who had prayed at the jinja for success in the karate competition, and returned to the jinja… Read More »Olympic Prayers

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