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Shinto

Tsunekiyo Tanaka, Head of Jinja Honchō

I have a subscription to Jinja Shinpō, which is effectively the house newspaper of Jinja Shinto. The priests of the 80,000 jinja affiliated to Jinja Honchō (The Association of Shinto Shrines) all have subscriptions, and almost nobody else does; most articles assume that the readers are Shinto priests. This provides an interesting window on what is important to Jinja Honchō, and a less direct view of what is important to Shinto priests in general. In the October 17 2016 issue, there is a long interview with Tsunekiyo Tanaka. He is… Read More »Tsunekiyo Tanaka, Head of Jinja Honchō

Patreon is Live

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.

Launch on Saturday

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

A Change of Focus

[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 (The Shinto Culture Exam)

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)

Shinto Concerns

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