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AI Norito

Jinja Shinpō has an irregular series of short opinion pieces by journalists working on the paper, printed on the first page. (In weeks when they do not have one, they print a short explanation of why they appear to be spelling so many words wrong — they use the pre-war conventions for kana choice, although they do use hiragana rather than katakana.) The 19th June issue had one, about changes in society. It started by discussing the problems that the law was having keeping up with generative AI, particularly the… Read More »AI Norito

More Hemp

The 12th June issue of Jinja Shinpō carried yet another article about hemp. This one reported on a meeting of a study group at the National Diet, where Diet members were told about some of the details of how varieties of hemp could be regulated to avoid growing versions with detectable levels of THC, and so on. It really sounds like it was a study group. There were some Diet members associated with Shinto present to make the report seem more appropriate to the venue, but even so there have… Read More »More Hemp

City Matsuri

In this post, I would like to talk about another article from Issue 267/268 of the Journal of Shintō Studies, “Urban Festivals as a Local Resource for Social Interconnectivity: Redevelopment of Nihonbashi, Chuo-ku, Tokyo, and the Kanda Festival”, by Akino Jun’ichi. This is pretty much the polar opposite of the last article I wrote about, because it concerns the way in which one of the largest matsuri in Japan, the Kanda Matsuri, has responded to a recent surge in the population of its ujiko, including the arrival of dozens of… Read More »City Matsuri

Unproductive Oversight Council Meeting

The “tl:dr” is the title. If you want to read more about the internal dispute in Jinja Honchō over the presidency, the rest of the article is here for you. If you think it is a largely trivial distraction from more important issues facing the Shinto community, then I’m not going to tell you that you’re wrong. Still, it is a major topic within the Shinto community at the moment, so I do feel the need to cover it. As I have mentioned before, Jinja Honchō holds a series of… Read More »Unproductive Oversight Council Meeting

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