My Patreon for essays describing Shinto as objectively and accurately as I can manage is now live. Please take a look. https://www.patreon.com/mimusubi Posts on this site will be more about my personal opinions or individual approach to Shinto, while the Patreon essays will be about facts that, in theory, anyone who studied the subject could agree on. I hope you find them interesting.
I am going to formally launch the new project, to write essays introducing Shinto supported through Patreon, on Saturday this week. That day is the anniversary of my arrival in Japan, which I think makes it a suitably significant day on which to begin a new venture. Ahead of the launch, I went to my local jinja today to have a ceremony asking the kami to support the project. I took along a printout of the first essay, the one that all patrons will get free when they sign up,… Read More »Launch on Saturday
[Note added in October 2019: All the RPG articles that used to be on this site can now be found on davidchart.com, mostly in the Kannagara category. There should be functioning redirects for every page that was here to the new location there.] I have decided to change the focus of this website, to be on Shinto more generally. There are a couple of reasons for this. The first is that the game development has moved to doing the School of Magic game first, and that has nothing to do… Read More »A Change of Focus
Jinja Kentei was started three years ago, and is run by the Foundation for Promoting Japanese Culture, which is extremely closely associated with Association of Shinto Shrines. (I suspect that there are legal reasons, to do with the regulations for religious corporations and secular foundations, for having two organisations, but I don’t know.) The Association of Shinto Shrines is overseeing the examination, with the goal of spreading accurate knowledge about Shinto and jinja. The examination for Jinja Kentei is, of course, held only in Japanese, and is based on Japanese… Read More »Jinja Kentei (The Shinto Culture Exam)
Today, I want to introduce some of the topics that Shinto priests and practitioners are actively concerned with. To do that, I’m going to provide extremely short summaries of all the articles in one issue of Jinja Shinpo. Jinja Shinpo is a weekly newspaper, published by a company that is effectively controlled by the Association of Shinto Shrines. It is not exactly the house journal, but it is close. This is not the only approach to Shinto found in Japan, but it is arguably the most important. The issue I’m… Read More »Shinto Concerns
This post is not directly concerned with Kannagara, but it is concerned with a very important aspect of contemporary Shinto — its connection with the ultranationalism and militarism of Japan in the Second World War. This is an aspect that, as least to start with, I plan to avoid in the game, but it is something that anyone interested in Shinto needs to be aware of. You may have gathered from the news that Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visited Yasukuni Jinja on December 26th. (See the Guardian, the BBC,… Read More »Shinzo Abe’s Visit to Yasukuni Jinja