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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

Appeal Decision

On June 14th, the Tokyo High Court handed down its decision in the appeal from the District Court in the case over the presidency of Jinja Honchō. The result was reported in the June 26th issue of Jinja Shinpō. The appeal was rejected, so the High Court agreed that Revd Ashihara is not the new president. Jinja Honchō was, of course, delighted by this. They sent out an announcement to all the Jinjachō saying that it was now clear that Revd Tanaka was the president, and that the chairman should… Read More »Appeal Decision

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