David Chart

This weekend, I went to half of the annual meeting of the Society of Shinto Studies. Unfortunately, it was being held over the weekend, and I have to work on Saturdays, so I could only attend the Sunday. Sunday was the day for individual research presentations, and there were four parallel sessions; obviously, I could only attend one. There were five presentations in the session I attended, and they were all interesting. The first presentation was about Shinto and the environment, and it drew my attention to some more possibilities,… Read More »Society of Shinto Studies Meeting

This week’s Jinja Shinpō included an article about “Dai Ni no Furusato Sōsei Kyōkai”, “Second Hometown Creation Group”, an organisation of volunteers that has recently started up, based at a jinja in Tokyo. (They have a web page, but it is entirely in Japanese.) The group plans to engage in two kinds of activity. The first is sending small groups of volunteers to help out at matsuri, and the other is to plant new woodlands, based on the sacred woodlands at jinja (“Chinju no Mori”). In both cases, the organisation… Read More »“Second Hometown”

Over the weekend, I visited Kinkasan Koganëyama Jinja again. This is a jinja on an island off the coast of Miyagi Prefecture in northeastern Japan, and the closest land in Japan to the epicentre of the 2011 earthquake. I first visited in 2013, and I have been at least once every year since, so I have seen the progress of the rebuilding, and I have talked about it on the blog before. The jinja is interesting in several ways. One is that it is on an island, and is the… Read More »Kinkasan Koganëyama Jinja

Today it was cold and raining heavily, and I went to see the Daijōkyū. The Daijōkyū is the complex of buildings in which the Daijōsai is held; it is built specially for the ceremony, and demolished again soon afterwards. However, for a few weeks it is possible for anyone who happens to be in Tokyo to go to see it. The Daijōkyū was first opened yesterday, when it had, according to the news, 20,000 visitors. One advantage of going in the cold and the rain was that there were not… Read More »The Daijōkyū

There are many ceremonies connected to the accession of a new Tennō, and last week’s Daijōsai is the most important Shinto ritual among them. The whole series is concluded with a performance of kagura, sacred music and dance, before the Kashikodokoro, where Amaterasu Ōmikami is enshrined within the Imperial palace. This time, the kagura will be offered in December, over the course of about six hours, starting around sunset. Jinja Shinpō carried a couple of articles about this on the 7th and 14th of October. Fifteen songs are performed in… Read More »Too Sacred To Hear

Tonight, the central ceremony of the Daijōsai will be held, in the Daijōkyū in the grounds of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo. The Tennō will, in person, make offerings to Amaterasu Ōmikami, as the ancestral kami of the Imperial line, and to all the kami of the heavens and the earth. This ceremony is performed once by each Tennō, at the beginning of their reign, and it is the most important of all the Shinto rites performed by the Tennō. I have written two essays about the Daijōsai for my… Read More »The Daijōsai