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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

The Difficulties of Recovery

It is more than twelve years since the Great East Japan Earthquake. In a lot of ways, the recovery has gone well, but the sheer scale of the disaster means that it is far from complete, even now. The magazine “The Imperial Family” has a series of articles chronicling the recovery of a wide range of jinja, although the pandemic meant that it went on hiatus for a couple of years, because the journalists were unable to visit the jinja in question. They have restarted in the Spring 2023 issue.… Read More »The Difficulties of Recovery

The Shortage of Priests

“There are not enough priests.” This is the opening paragraph of the editorial in the May 29th issue of Jinja Shinpō. It goes on to quote the figures from the report on new graduates — 226 new priests, and 584 vacancies — before getting into a discussion of the problem. It seems that, recently, new priests looking for a jinja have moved beyond considering the location and the fame of the jinja. They are also looking at the “service conditions”, and jinja are being rejected because there are not enough… Read More »The Shortage of Priests