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Shinto

Devotion to Duty

This post is about another of the jinja affected by the Great East Japan Earthquake, as reported in the Spring 2023 issue of “The Imperial Family”. This one, Watatsumi Jinja, is in Iitatë, in Fukushima Prefecture. This village was badly contaminated after the meltdown at the nuclear power station due to bad luck with the direction of the wind, but it was not actually that badly hit by the earthquake itself, and is too far inland (and at too high an elevation) to be affected by the tsunami. The radiation… Read More »Devotion to Duty

Jinja Without Ujiko

This post is about another article in Issue 267/268 of the Journal of Shintō Studies: “The Effects of Inactive and Semi-Inactive Shintō Shrines on Local Communities — A Case Study of a Super-Aged Community —”, by Fuyutsuki Ritsu. Dr Fuyutsuki has been researching jinja in depopulated areas of Kōchi Prefecture, on the Japanese island of Shikoku, for many years, and has already published a book about it (which I have read, and may write about properly at some point). This article is about the same region, but focuses on a… Read More »Jinja Without Ujiko

The Difficulties of Recovery

It is more than twelve years since the Great East Japan Earthquake. In a lot of ways, the recovery has gone well, but the sheer scale of the disaster means that it is far from complete, even now. The magazine “The Imperial Family” has a series of articles chronicling the recovery of a wide range of jinja, although the pandemic meant that it went on hiatus for a couple of years, because the journalists were unable to visit the jinja in question. They have restarted in the Spring 2023 issue.… Read More »The Difficulties of Recovery

The Shortage of Priests

“There are not enough priests.” This is the opening paragraph of the editorial in the May 29th issue of Jinja Shinpō. It goes on to quote the figures from the report on new graduates — 226 new priests, and 584 vacancies — before getting into a discussion of the problem. It seems that, recently, new priests looking for a jinja have moved beyond considering the location and the fame of the jinja. They are also looking at the “service conditions”, and jinja are being rejected because there are not enough… Read More »The Shortage of Priests

Shichi-go-san During COVID-19

I recently read the combined Issue 267/268 of the Journal of Shintō Studies, the academic journal of the Society of Shintō Studies, which I have mentioned before. This was a special issue, “A Religious Studies Perspective on Shintō”, and it contained a number of interesting articles. (I think I have mentioned before this journal has official English titles for all the articles, although the content is only in Japanese.) The article I want to talk about today is “The Meaning of Shichi-go-san and the Impact of COVID” by Taguchi Yūko.… Read More »Shichi-go-san During COVID-19

The Significance of OECMs

The editorial in the May 1st issue of Jinja Shinpō was about OECMs, the regions that are not nature reserves but that are recognised under the international biodiversity treaty as serving to preserve biodiversity. It talked a bit about the background, and then noted that, over the last couple of years, there have been a lot of articles on this topic in Jinja Shinpō, including the series on sacred forests. The editorial said that part of the reason was that sacred forests had been given as possible candidates for OECMs… Read More »The Significance of OECMs