Skip to content

Jinja and the State

Every year, the Society of Shintō Studies holds an academic conference at which its members give short papers. I attended a few years ago, but the pandemic and work commitments mean that I have only been once. I really should try to get there this year. In any case, summaries of the papers are published in the Journal of Shintō Studies a year or so later — in this case, in issue 269. These are very short papers (only a couple of printed pages), but they are a bit more… Read More »Jinja and the State

Otaue

“Otaue” is the name for Shinto ceremonies that mark the planting of rice seedlings in wet rice fields. In Japan, rice is normally sown in one place, and then replanted out into the wet rice fields around June, when it has grown a bit. “O-ta-ue” means “honourable-rice field-planting”, so the naming is quite straightforward. These ceremonies play an important role in the cycle of Shinto matsuri concerned with rice agriculture, and quite a lot of jinja maintain them today, despite the decline in the importance of agriculture as a field… Read More »Otaue

Ukrainian-Born Priestess

The 3rd July issue of Jinja Shinpō includes a short article about a meeting of ujiko and sōdai in a region of Saitama Prefecture (just to the north of Tokyo). Such reports are a standard feature of Jinja Shinpō, and they are not normally of any interest to the readers of this blog. This one is, because the meeting was addressed by a woman born in Ukraine, on the subject of the Russian invasion. It was sensible to invite her because she is a priest at one of the jinja… Read More »Ukrainian-Born Priestess

Natsumoude at Asakusa Jinja

On Wednesday, I spent the day volunteering to help out with Natsumoude at Asakusa Jinja again. This is an annual event, running from July 1st to July 7th, and it was started at Asakusa Jinja ten years ago. This year, Asakusa Jinja is aware of 429 jinja and 22 Buddhist temples that are participating. It is growing, and likely to continue to do so. My duties were defined as in previous years: standing in the main information tent, selling tanzaku on which to write Tanabata wishes, and answering queries. There… Read More »Natsumoude at Asakusa Jinja

Kamidana Booklet

Jinja Honchō has recently (within the last year) published a new booklet about kamidana. It is all in Japanese, but the information is basically the same as that in Shinto Practice for Non-Japanese, except that it is aimed at Japanese people in Japan. Given that target audience, their choices concerning presentation and what to cover are interesting. First, it opens with a double-page manga of two women going to a jinja, praying for weight loss and a boyfriend, and then getting an omikuji and omamori, before discovering that they have… Read More »Kamidana Booklet

New Book: Bungo and Hizen Fudoki

I have just put my latest collection of two past Patreon essays up for sale on Amazon: Myths from the Bungo & Hizen Fudoki. These two Fudoki do survive as independent works, rather than as quotations in other texts, but they look as though they have been severely edited. The remaining parts of the Bungo-no-Kuni Fudoki are remarkable for how little they say explicitly about jinja or kami, which means that there is substantially more material from the Hizen-no-Kuni Fudoki in this collection. Both of these regions are in Kyushu,… Read More »New Book: Bungo and Hizen Fudoki