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New Donations Law

The Japanese Diet recently passed a new law, called “The Law Concerning the Prevention of Inappropriate Solicitation of Donations by Corporations and Other Bodies, and Other Issues”. (I think that whoever started the trend for Japanese light novel titles like “That time I was reincarnated as a slime” may have had legal training.) This law was inspired by the actions of the former Unification Church, and thus it is particularly directed at religious corporations. The February 20th issue of Jinja Shinpō included an article reporting on a meeting held by… Read More »New Donations Law

Fractious Board Meeting

The February 20th issue of Jinja Shinpō included a long article on a meeting of the Board of Directors of Jinja Honchō, held on the 9th of February. While some ordinary business was conducted, and there was a discussion of the new law about donations (which will get its own blog post soon), the main event seems to have been a big fight over who was the president. A “big fight” is a slight exaggeration, as they do not appear to have come to blows, but the article explicitly refers… Read More »Fractious Board Meeting

The Practicalities of Receiving Offerings

The survey of priests’ experiences of hatsumōdë that I discussed last time also covered a couple of issues related to money: the service charge on depositing coins, and cashless payments. These are both serious issues for jinja, and both become more pressing around hatsumōdë. The new bank charges for depositing coins have had a large impact. A number of jinja reported finding a lot of small-denomination coins in the offering boxes this year, and reasonably concluded that people had decided that, rather than depositing them and paying the charges, they… Read More »The Practicalities of Receiving Offerings

Hatsumōdë Survey 2023

I mentioned in my earlier post that Jinja Shinpō was gathering more information about this year’s hatsumōdë. That information was published in the February 13th issue. The newspaper asked the priests who are affiliated with it as local reporters about their hatsumōdë experiences, and they received responses from 373 people across the whole of Japan. This is not a randomly selected representative sample, but it does cover a wide geographical area and many types of jinja, so it is the best data we are likely to get. The first thing… Read More »Hatsumōdë Survey 2023

New Book: Shinto on Ethics and Death

I have released a new book on Amazon collecting two of my Patreon essays: Shinto on Ethics and Death. These essays have been available separately on Gumroad for some time (Ethics and Death), and will remain available there. These essays cover topics that are often considered to be central to “religion”, but which are not at all central to Shinto. Indeed, for much of its history Shinto avoided having anything to do with death, and it has never been entirely clear on what, if anything, it thinks happens to you… Read More »New Book: Shinto on Ethics and Death

Some-Kami-Or-Other Jinja

Recently, I’ve been reading a book about Yahiko Jinja, a very important jinja in Niigata Prefecture. (彌彦神社、学生者、２００３) I may well write an essay about the jinja for my Patreon, in part because I have already visited it, but in this blog post I just want to talk about one of the massha — subsidiary jinja for kami that do not have a close association with the main kami. This jinja is called “Bō Jinja (某神社)”. “Bō” means “some-or-other”, and is used to refer indefinitely to someone or something. (Strictly speaking,… Read More »Some-Kami-Or-Other Jinja