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Shinto

Hatsumōdë: The Visitors’ View

In my last post, I reported on Jinja Shinpō’s hatsumōdë survey of about 400 priests across the country. They also conducted an online survey of about a thousand “ordinary” Japanese, to see how they had handled hatsumōdë this year. The first result they reported is that 78.2% of them had come across the encouragement to spread out hatsumōdë visits. That advertising campaign really does seem to have been effective, which underwrites the complaints made by rural priests, reported in my last post, that it was too much “one size fits… Read More »Hatsumōdë: The Visitors’ View

Shinto Ethics Essay

Buy Essay Last month’s Patreon essay was about Shinto ethics, and it is now available for purchase on Gumroad, for people who did not get it through the Patreon. Shinto does not put much emphasis on ethics, but that does not mean that the topic is entirely ignored. Obviously, individual Shinto priests have ethical standards, and priests do criticise certain activities on ethical grounds. However, there is very little in the way of “official” statements on ethics, which means that this essay is a distillation of things that have been… Read More »Shinto Ethics Essay

Purely Punning

The February 15th issue of Jinja Shinpō had a short article about a new purification font at Harina Jinja in Nagoya, a jinja I have actually visited. This font was designed to be hands-free, so there are no ladles, and there is a wheelchair-accessible font off to one side (the main font is on a small dais). However, that’s not what I want to talk about today. The water flows from six nozzles, placed around a hexagonal pillar. These nozzles are shaped like gourds, and 89 centimetres from the ground.… Read More »Purely Punning

Hatsumōdë: The Big Picture

This year’s hatsumōdë was, thanks to COVID-19, very different from most years. I have already written about some of the early reports, but Jinja Shinpō has now completed a survey of its local contacts, which means that it has responses from over 400 priests from across Japan, covering a wide range of types of jinja. The results show that, unsurprisingly, the impact of the pandemic varied a lot from jinja to jinja. The simplest statistic is that about 80% of jinja reported at least some fall in hatsumōdë visitors over… Read More »Hatsumōdë: The Big Picture

Papercraft Kamidana Items

The Tokyo Shinto Youth Association (Tokyo-to Shinto Seinenkai) has put some downloadable PDFs online for papercraft items for your kamidana. There is an ofuda-tatë, which is something to lean the ofuda against so that it stands up, a pair of koma-inu, and a pair of lanterns (which should not actually be lit because they are made of paper.) http://www.tokyo-shinsei.jp/papercraft.html The page and instructions are all in Japanese, but there are instructional videos, so they should be usable even if you cannot read Japanese. The download links are the things with… Read More »Papercraft Kamidana Items

Earthquake Commemoration

Next month will see the tenth anniversary of the Great East Japan Earthquake. There will, I am sure, be a number of events to mark it, and since it is a very solemn event to start with, the necessary pandemic countermeasures will not, I think, be a serious burden. (The largest issue that immediately comes to mind is that people who had to leave an area in the aftermath probably will not be able to go back for a memorial event.) Jinja Honchō is also asking jinja across Japan to… Read More »Earthquake Commemoration