Shinto

A few weeks ago, Jinja Honchō sent me an interesting leaflet. This leaflet is entitled “Omatsuri no Tebiki”, which means, roughly, “Instructions for Matsuri”. It is directed at sōdai. “Sōdai” means, literally, something like “general representatives”, and it refers to the people who support a jinja, in theory on behalf of all the ujiko, the people who live in the area around the jinja. They tend to be older, and that is how they are drawn in the leaflet. This particular leaflet is particularly for people who are sōdai at… Read More »Instructions for Matsuri

The entrance to nearly all jinja is marked by the traditional torii gate, with the distinctive double lintel. As I have mentioned before, there is no rule for what torii should be made of. Wood is the most traditional material; the most traditional of all is wood with the bark still on. However, stone is also common, as is bronze. Very large torii are often made of steel, and you can get plastic torii, which are very durable, and do not look very plastic. (You can also get plastic torii… Read More »Porcelain Torii

This week’s Jinja Shinpō included a number of articles of interest, including one by me. That one will be the basis of a Patreon essay in a couple of months, so I won’t talk about it here. There was also an article about Jingū starting the distribution of omamori and ofuda again, although they are still not doing formal prayers outside the regular matsuri. However, the articles I want to pick up are about online activities. Two short articles reported on online meetings held by administrative groups in Shizuoka Prefecture… Read More »Going Online

Back in May, a company that sells Shinto vestments had an advert in Jinja Shinpō. That is not so unusual; what is less common is that they printed the asking prices for most items. Since these were made public, we can safely assume that they are neither ridiculously high nor implausibly low; while there is bound to be variation depending on the source and the quality, these prices are probably representative. I will give all the prices in yen, as that is the currency they are sold in. For these… Read More »The Price of Vestments

As the first wave of COVID-19 comes to an end in Japan, businesses and other activities have started to reopen. The state of emergency has ended across the whole country, but new infections are still being detected, albeit at a fairly low level. This means that there is a lot of caution about restarting things at jinja. Jinja Honchō has gone back to normal working practices, but most jinja still seem to be restricting formal prayers inside the prayer hall, and keeping numbers at matsuri down. Because there is a… Read More »Continuing Adaptation

A few weeks ago, Jinja Shinpō had a full page article about the opening of the Okayama Peace Museum. This facility belongs to Okayamaken Gokoku Jinja: the jinja enshrining the war dead from Okayama prefecture (“ken” in Japanese). The Gokoku Jinja (“Nation-Protecting Jinja”) were, as I have mentioned before, founded before the war to enshrine people who had died fighting for the Tennō, much like local versions of Yasukuni Jinja. They were not really formalised until the 1940s, with some only being founded during the war, and as a result… Read More »Okayama Peace Museum