Shinto

There are some famous jinja ceremonies that involve tall poles. The most famous is Suwa Taisha, in Nagano Prefecture, where four tree trunks are set up at the sanctuaries in a matsuri held once every six years. Naturally, some people have suggested that this is phallic symbolism. I was reading a book on a different topic the other day, and it suggested that jinja as a whole were symbolic of the female reproductive organs. The torii is the vulva, the sacred path is the vagina (both are called “sandō” in… Read More »Dubious Symbolism

The Tōshōgū (a jinja enshrining Tokugawa Ieyasu, the founder of the Tokugawa shogunate that ruled Japan from 1600 to 1867) in Maebashi, Gunma Prefecture, has just completed a major rebuilding, and celebrated with a full-page article on the back of the November 1st Jinja Shinpō. So far, so standard. The style of the rebuilding is not at all standard. The original honden has been kept, and enclosed in a glass-and-marble structure that looks like a high-class hotel or shopping mall. The jinja’s website does not have any photographs up yet,… Read More »Jinja Architecture

The autumn meeting of the Jinja Honchō Oversight Council happened on October 20th, and was reported in the November 1st issue of Jinja Shinpō. It was not quite as dramatic as I had feared it could be: no-one resigned, no-one was fired, and there were no actual fistfights (at least according to the published report). However, it was quite dramatic enough. All the ordinary business was conducted, and all of that seems to have been passed without any trouble. The controversial issue was the ongoing court case, and so that… Read More »Oversight Council Meeting

The 1st November issue of Jinja Shinpō included an article about the completion of repairs on a jinja that was damaged in an earthquake. This in itself is not unusual, and the jinja is in Fukushima Prefecture, which had a lot of jinja damaged in the Great East Japan Earthquake. This particular jinja, however, was damaged in an earthquake that happened in February this year, and the repairs were completed in time for the Autumn Grand Festival in mid-September. The article starts off in the same way as most such… Read More »Reconstruction Practicalities

I wrote before about Amabië, a yōkai who became very popular as a ward against COVID-19 (and, given the low infection and death rates in Japan, maybe it worked…). There was an interesting article in the November 1st Jinja Shinpō about Amabië in space. Literally. A company in Tokyo that organises access to space for small groups or companies that want to do experiments is sending a package up to the International Space Station. Part of this package is a small (6 cm by 3 cm) aluminium panel with a… Read More »Amabië in Spaaaaace!

As I have mentioned before, it is unusual for images of kami to be the objects of devotion in Shinto. Most jinja do not have images of the kami on display, and although the goshintai are sometimes statues of the kami, that is not the most common situation. There are, of course, exceptions, such as images of Daikoku and Ebisu, or a local practice in Miyagi Prefecture that I have seen mentioned a few times but know little about. The October 25th issue of Jinja Shinpō had an article about… Read More »Kami Images